spending 3m on task force on 370 TOD clock ... issues like 1) was the
start 1/1/1900 or 1/1/1901 and 2) how to handle leap seconds

For something completely different, in the early 80s internal online
"century" forum discussing how to handle y2k

there was huge amount of Y2K remediation ... one time thing, so at lot
of it was outsourced. There was also competition with Internet bubble
paying premium prices ... so a lot of Y2k remediation got outsourced
to overseas (which contributed to continuing to "offshoring" in this
century).

One of the largest TBTF outsourced Y2K remediation of sensitive
transaction processing, including ATM machines ... to lowest
bidder. It wasn't until much later that they found backdoors and
stealth money wire transfers going to overseas accounts .... and the
lowest bidder was front for a criminal organization.

Boyd's briefings

Boyd's overheads are quite dense ... people would mention needing to
hear the briefing 2-3 times before meaning started to sink in
... there was lot more in the briefings than the overheads. Lots of
guidelines about talks taking minute per overhead ... 2-3hrs of Boyd's
overheads were hard to compress into single day ... and then it could
still require hearing it 2-3 times.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subboyd.html

Is multiprocessing better then multithreading?

infinisearch99 writes:
How exactly am I looking at two different aspects? I am plainly
talking about the paradigm put forth by the UNIX operating system.
Also just so you know 32bit x86 processor context is directly
supported by the hardware so in a way it does directly support
threads.

triva: In the 60s (w/o multiprocessor), CICS was developed because the
standard os/360 system services were so expensive, that it made it
impossible to justify doing a lot of online transactions. CICS acquired
a lot of system resources at startup ... and then provided a huge amount
of lightweight system services (including multithreading/multitasking)
and avoided using os/360 system services whenever possible. In the 70s,
multiprocessing became a lot more common but CICS was so tightly coded
that it couldn't operate in concurrent shared memory operation.
Alternative was for installation to run multiple copies of CICS
concurrently on the same machine. At the turn of the century, there were
large installations running over 120 simultaneous CICS copies on the
same machine (to take advantage of resources). It wasn't until 2004 that
CICS started to be enhanced so the (same) CICS could execute concurrent
threads on different processors.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#cics

Charlie had invented compare&swap instruction (name chosen because CAS
are charlie's initials) in the late 60s/early 70s, while working on CP67
lightweight kernel multiprocessor locking at the science center.
Attempting to get it added to (mainframe) 370 was met by opposition, the
POK favorite son operating system people claiming that test&set was more
than satisfactory. The 370 architecture owners said that to justify
compare&swap for 370 would require useage other than multiprocessor
locking. Thus was born the application multithread example uses that are
still included in mainframe principles of operation. compare&swap was
picked up by highly multithreaded applications like various DBMS
(independent of whether they ran on multiprocessor or single processor
configurations).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#smp

In the 80s, started to see other platforms start to include compare&swap
(and/or instructions with similar semantics) ... since it could make
significant difference in large commercial workload throughput
(alternative required kernel calls). In late 80s/early 90s started to
see POSIX support for lightweight threading and async i/o ... in part
motivated by commercial workloads like DBMS ... which had been doing
their own internally (somewhat like CICS in the 60s).

In summer 1968, Ed Sussenguth investigated making the ACS/360 into a
multithreaded design by adding a second instruction counter and a second
set of registers to the simulator. Instructions were tagged with an
additional "red/blue" bit to designate the instruction stream and
register set; and, as was expected, the utilization of the functional
units increased since more independent instructions were available.

US Patent 3,771,138, J.O. Celtruda, et al., "Apparatus and method for
serializing instructions from two independent instruction streams,"
filed August 1971, and issued November 1973. [Note that John Earle is
one of the inventors listed on the -138.]

In the early 70s I got sucked into 370/195 hyperthreading (that was
never announced or shipped). The issue was that 195 didn't have branch
prediction and conditional branches drained the pipeline. Most codes
ran on 370/195 at half peak throughput. Hyperthreading was to have two
i-streams (simulating two processors) ... each running at
half-throughput ... hopefully able to keep the 370/195 fully uitlized.

Part of the issue was decision to move to virtual memory for all 370s
... and it wasn't going to be possible to retrofit virtual memory
support to 370/195 (even to retrofit virtual memory to 370/165 ...
was a monumental task and even required dropping features in the
original 370 virtual memory architecture ... which impacted processors
and software already developed for the dropped features).

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Separation church and state

Jefferson constantly battling for separation of church & stte and
individual freedom, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, loc6457-59:
For Federalists, Jefferson was a dangerous infidel. The Gazette of the
United States told voters to choose GOD—AND A RELIGIOUS PRESIDENT or
impiously declare for "JEFFERSON-AND NO GOD."

... snip ...

Jefferson felt the Federalists striving for British form of government
with Lords and eventually a Monarch, starting with things like
loc6254-58:
The alien laws collectively invested the president the authority to
deport resident aliens he considered dangerous. The sedition bill
criminalized free speech, forbidding anyone to "write, print, utter or
publish any false, scandalous, and malicious writing or writings
against the government of the United States, or either House of the
Congress of the United States, with intent to defame or to bring them
into contempt or disrepute, or to excite against them, or either or
any of them, the hatred of the good people of the United States."

loc6266-67:
Once sedition legislation passed and was signed by Adams, the speaking
of one's mind—a foundational freedom—could result in fines up to
$2,000 and up to two years in prison.

... snip ...

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Early articles about the rise of 401Ks ... was wallstreet complained
that the large pension funds negotiated extremely thin fees
... wallstreet lobbied for 401Ks because they expected to get
significantly higher fees (than they could get from pension funds).

This has been going periodically for decades, wallstreet then got
401Ks ... then they got a lot of the remaining large pension funds
last decade ... selling them triple-A rated toxic securitized
mortgages (the pension funds restricted to investing in "safe
investments", wall street got around that by paying rating agencies
for triple-A, even when rating agencies knew they weren't worth
triple-A, from oct2008 congressional testimony), claims it accounts
for 30% loss in fund value. Current as SS trust fund has all been
"borrowed" by congress to pay for other stuff, they would have to
raise taxes in order to pay it back. I can imagine there will be a lot
of obfuscation and misdirection to avoid having to do that; toxic CDO
posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#toxic.cdo

Stockton (80s budget director) claims credit for increasing SS
contributions because he wanted the money for DOD w/o needing to raise
taxes. He also claims credit for starting to tax SS benefits (double
taxation, contributions are after tax income, and then taxed again
when benefits paid, sort of backdoor of transfering some of SS trust
fund to general fund)

Other gimmicks proposed. Like "means" testing ... not having to pay
you your SS benefits if you don't fit some profile.

Some IBM History

reference to the effect of FS failure had on corporate culture,
Ferguson & Morris, "Computer Wars: The Post-IBM World", Time Books,
1993, reference here:
http://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/fs.html
... and perhaps most damaging, the old culture under Watson Snr and Jr
of free and vigorous debate was replaced with sycophancy and make no
waves under Opel and Akers. It's claimed that thereafter, IBM lived in
the shadow of defeat

and ...
But because of the heavy investment of face by the top management, F/S
took years to kill, although its wrongheadedness was obvious from the
very outset. "For the first time, during F/S, outspoken criticism
became politically dangerous," recalls a former top executive.

trivia: I continued to work on 360/370 stuff during FS, even
periodically ridiculing FS activity ... which wasn't exactly a career
enhancing activity.

President of AMEX is in competition to be next CEO and wins. The
looser leaves taking their protegee and goes to Baltimore and take
over what is called a loan sharking business. They make some number of
other acquisitions eventually acquiring CITI in violation in
Glass-Steagall. Greenspan gives them an exemption while they lobby
congress for Glass-Steagall repeal, including enlisting the SECTREAS
(and former head of Goldman-Sachs), who resigns and joins CITI as soon
as the repeal is added to GLBA. The protegee then leaves CITI and
becomes CEO of CHASE.

IBM has gone in the red and was being reorganized into the 13 "baby
blues" in preparation to breaking up the company. The board then hires
away the former president of AMEX to reverse the breakup and resurrect
the comapny ... using some of the same techniques used at RJR.
http://www.ibmemployee.com/RetirementHeist.shtml

The former AMEX president then leaves IBM and becomes the head of
another large private-equity company ... one of the take-overs is the
beltway bandit that will employ Snowden.

then sat. photo recon analyst informed White House that Saddam was
marshaling forces for invasion of Kuwait. White House says that Saddam
told them he would do no such thing and proceeded to discredit the
analyst. then the analyst informed the White House that Saddam was
marshaling forces for invasion of Saudi Arabia. Now the Bush1 has to
choose between Saudi Arabia and Saddam.
http://www.amazon.com/Long-Strange-Journey-Intelligence-ebook/dp/B004NNV5H2/

Fareed Zakaria interview with Kissinger a few weeks ago had running
ticker at the bottom somewhat paraphrasing Kissnger (because he was
somewhat hard to hear?). Fareed was asking Kissinger about Putin,
referring to Kissinger having 30 or so meetings with Putin. At one
point Fareed said something about clarifying what Kissinger had said
(which was reflected in the ticker at the bottom) and Kissinger said
not at all ... and explained what he met (which was not reflected in
the ticker).

Kissinger somewhat indirectly referred to this theme about "Harvard
being responsible for the rise of Putin" (i.e. Russia needed strongman
to oppose the westerners that seemed intent on looting the
country). John Helmer: Convicted Fraudster Jonathan Hay, Harvard's Man
Who Wrecked Russia, Resurfaces in Ukraine
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/02/convicted-fraudster-jonathan-hay-harvards-man-who-wrecked-russia-resurfaces-in-ukraine.html
If you are unfamiliar with this fiasco, which was also the true
proximate cause of Larry Summers' ouster from Harvard, you must read
an extraordinary expose, How Harvard Lost Russia, from Institutional
Investor. I am told copies of this article were stuffed in every
Harvard faculty member's inbox the day Summers got a vote of no
confidence and resigned shortly thereafter.

... snip ...

How Harvard lost Russia; The best and brightest of America's premier university came to Moscow in the 1990s to teach Russians how to be capitalists. This is the inside story of how their efforts led to scandal and disgrace.
http://www.institutionalinvestor.com/Article/1020662/How-Harvard-lost-Russia.html
Mostly, they hurt Russia and its hopes of establishing a lasting
framework for a stable Western-style capitalism, as Summers himself
acknowledged when he testified under oath in the U.S. lawsuit in
Cambridge in 2002. "The project was of enormous value," said Summers,
who by then had been installed as the president of Harvard. "Its
cessation was damaging to Russian economic reform and to the
U.S.-Russian relationship."

Repeal of Glass-Steagall wasn't directly responsible for the
economic mess ... but it gave rise to too big to fail and
then too big to prosecute and too big to jail ... which
met they wouldn't be held accountable for what they had done (of the
$5.2T in off-book toxic assets still held by the four largest
TBTF at ye2008, CITI was holding the most).disclaimer: 1999 I
was asked to try and help prevent the coming economic mess. Also, not
all the US capitalists were out to loot Russia, there was an effort to
help create capitalist banking system by building 5,000
brick&mortar banks around the country (innovative financing for
the $5B needed for $1M/bank) ... but that all fell apart when things
imploded. I only met Rubin at financial industry infrastructure
protection meeting in the white house annex. The Treasury did sponsor
me for some meetings with NSA about infrastructure protection. After a
couple meetings, the fort told me they never wanted to see me again,
their only customer was the Pentagon (I may have offended them, they
had approved some financial operations as "safe", I then suggested
some ways to attack, they said what I suggested wasn't fair).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_infrastructure_protection

The local press in DC will sometimes refer to washington politics as
Kabuki Theater, what you see publicly has little to do with what is
really going on ... others will estimate that there is no more than
1-3 honest members of congress ... all part of the line that congress
is the most corrupt institution on earth.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#kabuki.theater

Contributing last decade was big uptic in private-equity acquiring
beltway bandits ... including Snowden's employer (private-equity tend
to put enormous pressure on their acquisitions to cut corners and
provide them money every way possible, the outsourcing of security
clearances to private-equity subsidiaries were found to just be
filling out the paperwork, and not actually doing the background
checks).

Note a major 2008 campaign item of current president, was the reversal
of the massive outsourcing. While that didn't happened, at least the
increase seemed to have stopped

trivia: jan2009 (a decade after being asked to help and try and
prevent the coming economic crisis), I was asked to HTML'ize the
Pecora hearings (30s congressional hearings into crash of '29,
resulted in criminal convictions and Glass-Steagall) with lots
of internal HREFs and URLs between what happened then and what
happened this time (comments that the new congress might have an
appetite to do something). I work on it for awhile and then get a call
that it wouldn't be needed after all (comment that capital hill was
buried under enormous mountains of wallstreet cash, in that sense
references to TBTF as excuse for not being prosecuted was
somewhat misdirection). post
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#Pecora&/orGlass-Steagall

Note that first time I saw references to TBTF as too big to
prosecute and too big to jail ... was
when TBTF were found to be money laundering for drug cartels
and terrorists and instead of being shutdown and thrown in jail, they
were fined and asked to please stop. The joke has become that the
fines are so small compared to the amounts involved they are just
being viewed as the cost of running a criminal enterprise, not just
the economic mess and money laundering, but also manipulating LIBOR,
FOREX, and commodity markets, robo-signing mills fabricating mortgage
documents, tax evasion, and various other criminal activity.

other trivia: in 1999 as part of trying to prevent the coming economic
mess, I was asked to improve the integrity of supporting documents for
securitized mortgages. Securitized mortgages had been used during the
S&L crisis to obfuscate fraudulent mortgages (poster child was
office bldgs in the Dallas/Ft.Worth area that turned out to be empty
lots). However, they then found they could pay the rating agencies for
triple-A rating (when the rating agencies knew they weren't worth
triple-A, from Oct2008 congressional testimony). Triple-A trumps
supporting documents and they could start doing no-documentation liar
loans (and with no documents, there was no longer issue of document
integrity). From the law of unintended consequences, the TBTF
largest fines related to the economic mess so far have been for the
robo-signing mills fabricating the "missing" documents. posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#toxic.cdo

Note that the triple-A ratings are largely responsible for being able
to do over $27T in the 2001-2008 ... including selling toxic
securitized mortgages to institutions restricted to dealing in "safe"
investments, like large pension funds (claims to account for 30% loss
in value).

Paying for triple-A rating enabled being able to almost immediately
sell off every loan made, eliminated any reason to care about loan
quality and/or borrowers' qualification. Then they found they get
create securitized mortgages designed to fail, pay for triple-A
rating, sell to their victims and take out CDS gambling bets that they
would fail (creating enormous demand for bad mortgages and instead of
not caring about borrowers' qualifications, they started looking for
borrowers w/o qualifications).

even more other trivia: rhetoric on floor of congress was that
Sarbanes-Oxley would prevent future ENRONs and guarantee that
executives and auditors did jail time, but it required SEC to do
something. Possibly because even GAO didn't believe SEC was doing
anything, it started doing reports of public company fraudulent
financial filings ... even showing uptic after SOX goes into effect
(and nobody doing jailtime). Less well known is that SOX also included
provision that SEC do something about the rating agencies.

S&L trivia: the original S&L regulator refused to go along
with the deregulation requests. He was then asked to resign so that
the president could appoint somebody that would go along. This
discusses the replacement regulator and what he did (he later leaves
gov. service and gets an enormous paying job on wallstreet as reward),
but doesn't talk about the original regulator that refused to go along
http://www.amazon.com/Two-Trillion-Dollar-Meltdown-Rollers-ebook/dp/B0097DE7DM/

another family member presides over the economic mess 70 times larger
than the S&L crisis. S&L crisis had 1000 criminal convictions
with jailtime, proportionally the economic mess should have 70,000.

BASEL2 trivia: early part of century we were asked in to NYFED to
discuss how new provision in original BASEL2 draft could be
implemented ... (had been added by somebody in NYFED that would help
hold executives responsible). However during the review process, the
new provision was almost totally eliminated ... mostly by US
institutions (most of the EU institutions seemed to be in favor of new
provision).

Note that just the four largest TBTF were still holding $5.2T
in offbook toxic assets the end of 2008 ... TARP with just $700B
appropriated (originally to buy those toxic assets) was way too small
to handle the problem and so was used for other purposes (which may
have been the original intention all along) ... and the FEDRES behind
the scenes bought the toxic assets at 98cents on the dollar and
provided tens of trillions in ZIRP funds.

There was farce during Jan2009 when they were talking about how hard
it was to correctly evaluate the offbook toxic assets for purchase.
The two "real" problems were 1) there was no supporting documentation
to be used for any evaluation (no documentation, liar loans) and 2)
the appropriated money couldn't come close to clearing the problem
(late summer 2008, tens of billions in toxic assets had gone for
22cents on the dollar, if the TBTF had been forced to bring the
toxic assets back onto their books, they would be declared insolvent
and forced to be liquidated; repeal of Glass-Steagall did help
with the carrying of toxic assets off-book).

The FEDRES fought long hard legal battle to prevent disclosing what it
was doing and when they lost, the chairman held a press conference.
He explained that he thought that the TBTF would use the trillions in
ZIRP funds to help mainstreet, but when they didn't, he had no
way to force them (but that didn't stop the ZIRP funds). Note
that the FED Chairman had supposedly been selected in part because he
was depression scholar. However, the FED had tried something similar
during the depression with similar results, so the chairman should
have had no expectation for a different result this time.

trivia: AIG was the largest holder of the CDS gambling bets (that
securitized mortgages would fail) and was negotiating to pay off at
50cents on the dollar. Then the SECTREAS stepped in and had them sign
a document saying they couldn't sue those making the gambling bets and
to take TARP funds to pay off at face value. The largest recipient of
TARP funds was AIG and the largest recipient of face value payoffs was
firm formally headed by SECTREAS.

The #2 on times list of those responsible for economic mess (and
behind GLBA) probably got that position in part for also being behind
preventing CDS gambling bets from being regulated. From the law of
unintended consequences, this was originally billed as "gift" to
ENRON. When the chair of CFTC proposed regulating CDS, she got quickly
replaced by #2's wife, while he got legislation passed preventing CDS
regulation. The wife then resigns and joins ENRON board (and the audit
committee).

trivia: in the financial critical industry protection meetings, the
number #1 concern of many of the attendees was making sure that the
information sharing ISAC
https://www.fsisac.com/

was structured in such a way so it was not subject to FOIA (i.e. it
couldn't be a gov. related operation), they were more concerned about
the public finding out about exploits (than they were concerned about
the exploits).Exploits have been going on for some time, even against
utilities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_infrastructure_protection

TBTF were much more concerned about WalMart and Microsoft (than
payday lenders, being behind much of their funding). Original rhetoric
on floor of congress as to the primary purpose of GLBA was if you
already had banking charter, you got to keep it; but if you didn't
already have a banking charter, you couldn't get one ... specifically
calling out Microsoft and WalMart ... aka eliminating banking
competition that had more cost effective technologies (afterwards
there were additional favors for wallstreet added, like repeal
of Glass-Steagall, claim is GLBA cost wallstreet $250M, nearly
evenly divided between the two parties)

Around 2004, WalMart announces it was acquiring Utah ILC in order to
become its own "merchant acquirer" (Utah ILCs have some funny
provisions for doing national operations, w/o needing national banking
charter). WalMart does something like 25-30% of retail transactions in
the US ... so it would be a big financial hit to Walmart's merchant
acquirer, Chase. Then a writing campaign is started to get community
banks to complain to their congressmen that WalMart was threatening
their consumer and issuing business (with their purchase of Utah ILC,
which had nothing to do with consumer business, but it could be an
enormous hit to Chase).

Note it turns out that FEDRES could only provide ZIRP funds to
institutions that had banking charter ... and some of the TBTF
didn't have banking charter ... so FEDRES was handing out bank
charters (in theory violating GLBA) to their friends ... in order to
make them eligible for ZIRP funds.

I had earlier come up with a scheme that enabled transactions done at
checkout counter to magically turn into banking transactions ... w/o
requiring banking charter ... at about 1/10th what it cost banks ...

Some IBM History

Lots of engineers saw it, at one time senior execs had engineering
experience ... but then it changed to bean counters, marketing, MBAs,
etc ... that no longer had any feel for technology issues ...they were
steeped in linear change and couldn't recognize disruptive change

In the late 70s I was involved in project that had potential for
disruptive change and took it to business planners in white plains and
some of the U.S. regions ... forecasts where some percent of whatever
closest similar product was. It wasn't until we were talking to
business planners on the other side of the Pacific that non-linear
factors would be considered

It wasn't just CMOS, late 80s, a senior disk engineer got a talk
scheduled at internal annual world-wide communication group conference
supposedly on 3174 performance ... but opened the talk with the
statement that the communication group was going to be responsible for
the demise of the disk division. The issue was that the communication
group had strategic responsibility for everything that crossed the
datacenter walls and were fiercely fighting off client/server and
distributed computing, trying to preserve their (emulated) dumb
terminal paradigm and install base. The disk division was seeing data
fleeing the data center to more distributed computing friendly
platforms with drop in disk sales. The disk division had come up with
several solutions to address the problem but they were constantly
being vetoed by the communication group. some past posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#terminal

Unable to get IBM-logo'ed mainframe distributed computing features
past the communication group, we did some consulting for disk division
executive that started investing in startups that would do mainframe
oriented distributed computing support ... he also funded the original
POSIX (aka "open system") support in MVS (got it past the
communication group since it technically didn't cross the datacenter
walls).

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Attack SS Entitlements

Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception
(George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller), pg154/loc2949-51:
Given the dependence of the vast majority of the population on Social
Security, it is surprising that any politician would tamper with
it. But the belief in New Story has been so great that there was a
serious threat. In 2004, the George W. Bush Administration proposed to
"privatize" a significant portion of the program.

Note last decade, related activity, in 2002, (new century republican)
congress lets fiscal responsibility act lapse (from last century
republican congress, spending couldn't exceed tax revenue, on its way
to eliminating all federal debt). 2010 CBO report that 2003-2009, taxe
revenue cut $6T and spending increase $6T, for $12T budget gap (at
nearly $2T/yr) compared to fiscal responsible budget. Since then taxes
haven't been restored and spending only moderately cut, so debt has
continued to increase. 2005, US comptroller general started including
in speeches that nobody in congress was capable of middle school
arithmetic (for what they were doing to budget). posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#fiscal.responsibility.actregulatory capture
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#regulatory.capture

Long winded article, about increasing SS contributions and starting to
tax benefits
http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/09/ronald-reagan-and-the-great-social-security-heist/
President Reagan and his advisors knew, from the very beginning, that
the government would soon face a severe cash shortage. Budget
Director, David Stockman, had deliberately rigged the computer at the
Office of Management and Budget to generate bogus revenue forecasts in
an effort to convince Congress to enact Reagan's unaffordable proposed
tax cuts. When Stockman first fed the data from Reagan's economic
proposals into the computer, he was shocked. The computer forecast
that, if Reagan's proposals were enacted into law, massive budget
deficits would loom ahead for as far as the eye could see.

... snip ...

Stockman has several times claimed credit for the SS changes
(increasing contributions for funding other activies and taxing
benefits) ... although it doesn't say so in the above article
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Stockman

Looting Social Security
http://www.counterpunch.org/2010/02/19/looting-social-security/
Two Wall Street henchmen, Alan Greenspan and David Stockman, set up
the Social Security raid in this way: The Carter administration had
put Social Security in the black for the foreseeable future by
establishing a schedule for future Social Security payroll tax
increases. Greenspan and Stockman conspired to phase in the payroll
tax increases earlier than was needed in order to gain surplus Social
Security revenues that could be used to finance other government
spending, thus reducing the budget deficit. They sold it to President
Reagan as "putting Social Security on a sound basis."

British originally tried to emulate the Spanish for North America
starting with Jamestown (1607), those sent over had no background in
self-sufficient, planning on enslaving local population, however
natives weren't amenable to enslaving and the settlement
starves. British eventually then started sending over select members
from British Isles as slaves, from crown charters for colonies (part
of what Jefferson was trying to change and fighting against):
The clauses of the Fundamental Constitutions laid out a rigid social
structure. At the bottom were the "leet-men," with clause 23 noting,
"All the children of leet-men shall be leet-men, and so to all
generations."

...
As North America developed, English elites tried time and time again
to set up institutions that would heavily restrict the economic and
political rights for all but a privileged few of the inhabitants of
the colony

something Jefferson thot he had to constantly fight against. Part of
the strategy from Britain ... was that the church had been enlisted to
help maintain rigid social structure. The "Spanish" model they were
trying to emulate:
The full gamut of encomienda, mita, repartimiento, and trajin was
designed to force indigenous people's living standards down to a
subsistence level and thus extract all income in excess of this for
Spaniards. This was achieved by expropriating their land, forcing them
to work, offering low wages for labor services, imposing high taxes,
and charging high prices for goods that were not even voluntarily
bought. Though these institutions generated a lot of wealth for the
Spanish Crown and made the conquistadors and their descendants very
rich, they also turned Latin America into the most unequal continent
in the world and sapped much of its economic potential

... snip ...

New England has some fleeing from religious persecution, not looking
for religious freedom, but someplace where they are the persecutORS
(rather than the persecutEES) ... and suffered other characteristics
similar to Jamestown settlement. Jefferson was against organization
religion ... so many responsible for evil, he didn't deny GOD, but the
evils of organized religion.

loc9408-10:
The making of the University of Virginia was Jefferson's last great
effort of will and leadership. It called on his political,
intellectual, and architectural gifts. As with so much in his life,
there were compromises and problems (he spent too much money), but
also as with so much else, Jefferson created something that endured.

loc9426-29:
His first university appointment fell victim to the kind of sectarian
religious strife that drove him to distraction. In 1820, Thomas
Cooper, a Unitarian, was asked to come to the university as a
professor. The state's religious world reacted badly, mounting what
Jefferson called a "Holy Inquisition," and the zealots won. 54
Jefferson was forced to back down.

loc9432-37:
The immediate cause of worry for sectarian observers was Jefferson's
refusal to include a professor of divinity on the faculty. In his 1822
annual report as rector, Jefferson gently but unmistakably shifted the
burden back to the individual faiths themselves, offering any sect the
opportunity to build and fund its own school on the grounds of the
university. The library would be open to all, and officials would
allow students the ability to attend classes of a sectarian nature as
well as ordinary university courses--"but always understanding,"
Jefferson wrote, "that these schools shall be independent of the
University and of each other."

one of the scenarios from the 60s to optimize use of scarce real storage
... was self-modifying code ... modifying instructions on the fly for
specific cases.

this became less & less useful as real memory become more plentiful, and
major problem later Harvard architectures with non-synchronized
I(instruction) and D(ata) caches became more common (loaders required
special instructions to flush D-caches address ranges back to memory and
flush I-cache address ranges from cache ... so future I-cache references
were forced to be loaded from memory.

APL is also interpreted ... so the interpreter could have very good
I-cache locality to partially offset interpreted overhead. Various
cache-miss compensation, like prefetch and out-of-order execution, has
offset some of this; i.e. latency for memory access, cache-miss measured
in count of processor cycles ... is compareable to 60s disk access
latency measured in count of 60s processor cycles.

ported APL\360 to CP67/CMS for CMS\APL ... workspace size was opened to
full virtual memory size. A big early problem was that APL allocated a
new storage location for every assignment, when all workspace memory was
exhausted, it would do collection/compaction and then restart (even very
small looping program could easily do repeatedly exhaust all available
workspace). Moving to demand page virtual memory (much larger than
available real storage) even a simple APL program could result in severe
page thrashing. Before CMS\APL could be released, all this had to be
reworked.

APL and/or HONE posts (HONE was virtual machine based, online world-wide
sales&marketing system, majority was APL applications, largest APL use I
know of in the world, trivia: one of my hobbies at IBM was enhanced
production operating systems for internal datacenters and HONE was
longtime customer)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hone

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

I remember in the 70s at the IBM science center, reading numerous
references to this:

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds; loc2276-79:
The Oregon researchers went and tested the hypothesis anyway. It
turned out to be true. If you wanted to know whether you had cancer or
not, you were better off using the algorithm that the researchers had
created than you were asking the radiologist to study the X-ray. The
simple algorithm had outperformed not merely the group of doctors; it
had outperformed even the single best doctor. You could beat the
doctor by replacing him with an equation created by people who knew
nothing about medicine and had simply asked a few questions of
doctors.

log2289-90:
The implications were vast. "If these findings can be generalized to
other sorts of judgmental problems," Goldberg wrote, "it would appear
that only rarely--if at all--will the utilities favor the continued
employment of man over a model of man."

loc2291-93:
Why would the judgment of an expert--a medical doctor, no less--be
inferior to a model crafted from that very expert's own knowledge? At
that point, Goldberg more or less threw up his hands and said, Well,
even experts are human. "The clinician is not a machine," he
wrote. "While he possesses his full share of human learning and
hypothesis-generating skills, he lacks the machine's reliability."

loc2296-99:
Right after Goldberg published those words, late in the summer of
1970, Amos Tversky showed up in Eugene, Oregon.

... snip ...

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

The Irish Slave Trade - The Forgotten "White" Slaves
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-irish-slave-trade-the-forgotten-white-slaves/31076
From 1641 to 1652, over 500,000 Irish were killed by the English and
another 300,000 were sold as slaves. Ireland's population fell
from about 1,500,000 to 600,000 in one single decade. Families were
ripped apart as the British did not allow Irish dads to take their
wives and children with them across the Atlantic. This led to a
helpless population of homeless women and children. Britain's
solution was to auction them off as well.

Sounds like medicare part-D in 2003. CBS 60mins did segment on 18
republican congressmen and staffers responsible for getting part-D
through. At last minute they add one line sentence and prevent CBO
from distributing report of the change. Within six months of passing,
all 18 had resigned and on drug industry payroll. US Comptroller
General later includes in speeches that part-D comes to be long-term
$40T item that swamps all other budget items.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#medicare.part-dUS Comptroller General posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#comptroller.general

It was 1st major bill passed after they let financial responsibility
act lapse in 2002 (spending couldn't exceed tax revenue, on its way to
eliminating all federal debt). 2010 CBO report was that 2003-2009, tax
revenue was cut $6T and spending was increased $6T for $12T budget gap
compared to fiscal responsible budget (deficit almost $2T/yr). Since
then spending has decreased, but taxes haven't been restored so debt
continues to increase. It will be major burden going forward since
just interest on the debt is now pushing half trillion/yr. By 2005, US
Comptroller General is (also) including in speeches that nobody in
Congress is capable of middle school arithmetic for how badly they are
savaging the budget.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#fiscal.responsibility.actregulatory capture
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#regulatory.capture

.... but avoided providing the appropriations for VA health for a long
time. A mental health care professional neighbor talked about that
when congress finally got around to increased funding for PTSD and
increase in health care professionals .... VA tried to hire nearly
every mental health care professional in the country. Problem was that
it was going to take some time before the system could produce the
number of mental health care professionals needed. The delay in
funding for VA shows up in other types of care also. When it looked
like congress wasn't going to increase total DOD budget,
military-industrial complex started lobbying for decreasing benefits
(so they could get a bigger piece of the available pie). In the mean
time, VA has had to resort to heavy drug doses (as alternative to
treatment by professional), most of these drugs are almost impossible
to get off ... so they may be on the drugs for the rest of their life,
which is (also) just fine with the drug industry.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

"Confidence Men" has a civil engineering professor talking to Volcker
about last several decades civil engineering programs at univ. being
eliminated (lack of building programs, lack of jobs for civil
engineering graduates, no jobs means drop off in students) ... and
Volcker responds:
"Well, I said, 'The trouble with the United States recently is we
spent several decades not producing many civil engineers and producing
a huge number of financial engineers. And the result is s*tty bridges
and a s*tty financial system!". Some number of recent US rebuild
projects have gone to companies from foreign countries that are still
producing civil engineering graduates.

... snip ...

Milton Friedman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman
Friedman promoted an alternative macroeconomic viewpoint known as
"monetarism", and argued that a steady, small expansion of the money
supply was the preferred policy.[12] His ideas concerning monetary
policy, taxation, privatization and deregulation influenced government
policies, especially during the 1980s.

including loc655-67:
By the time Pratt had finished, it was possible for a single
individual to take control of an S&L, then organize and lend to
multiple subsidiaries -- for land acquisition, construction, building
management, and the like -- and create his own small real estate
empire entirely with depositors' money.

another family member then presides over the economic mess 70 times
larger than the S&L crisis. S&L crisis had 1000 criminal
convictions with jailtime, proportionally the economic mess should
have 70,000.

TV show Mannix observations

Lawrence Statton NK1G <lawrence@senguio.mx> writes:
I once quipped to a friend, "If you're every lonely and want someone to
call, just grab onto tip and ring ... Murphy's law guarantees that the
phone will ring at that moment."

IBM developed (internal) encrypting 2400baud modem for travel/home. One
of the initial installs was for senior executive ... who installed it at
home ... story is that in some past life he had been EE and went to test
the contacts with the tip of his tongue ... when it just happened to
ring. He then decreed that all IBM products with RJ-phone jacks had to
have the contacts recessed so that babies (and senior execs) couldn't
touch it with their tongue.

follow up to dense code definition

hancock4 writes:
Could a good applications programmer write an assembler program
to perform that way? Or, are application programmers typically
restricted in accessing certain instructions (perhaps privileged
instructions)?

To conserve real memory and overhead, standard os/360 process was I/O
channel programs built by application (or library code running in
application space) ... and then passed to supervisor (SVC0/EXCP call)
for execution ... which did some (increasingly non-trivial) verification
... before initiating the actual i/o operation (supervisor not
differentiating whether the application directly built the channel
programs or they were built by library code running in application
space).

channel programs use real addresses ... so os/360 transition from real
to virtual addressing resulted in supervisor having to make a copy of
the channel program (passed from application), replacing all
(application) virtual addresses with their corresponding real
addresses. Most of the code in initial os/360 virtual memory
implementation was borrowed from virtual machine CP67 (CCWTRANS) that
copyied virtual machine channel programs, substituting real addresses
for virtual.

However, there is huge amount of hardware channel program chatter that
doesn't scale well. In 1980, STL was moving 300 people from the IMS
group with access back to the STL datacenter. The IMS people had tried
"remote 3270" and found the human factors totally unacceptable. I was
then con'ed into doing support for channel extension ... allowing
channel attached 3270 controllers at the offsite bldg. Part of the
protocol involved downloading the channel program to a channel simulator
at the remote site ... significantly masking the huge channel program
chatter overhead. For various reasons, people at the remote site didn't
see any difference in online activity ... and the associated mainframes
actually had higher throughput (after the move). The hardware vendor
then tried to get IBM to release my support ... but there was a group in
POK playing with some fiber stuff who got it blocked because they were
afraid if it was in the market, it would make it more difficult to get
their stuff out. some past posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#channel.extender

In 1988, I got asked if I could help LLNL standardize some serial stuff
they were playing with ... which quickly becomes Fibre Channel Standard
(FCS), including support for remote execution of I/O programs to
minimize protocol chatter latency.

In 1990, the POK people finally get their stuff released with ES/9000 as
ESCON (when it is already obsolete) ... basically simulating half-duplex
parallel copper with all the protocol chatter latency ... but running
over pairs of fiber.

The most recent IBM published mainframe peak I/O benchmark is for z196
using 104 FICONs (running over 104 FCS) getting 2M IOPS. About the same
time, an FCS was announced for E5-2600 blade claiming over million IOPS
(for single FCS, two such FCS having higher throughput than 104 FCS
running FICON).

They have published protocol enhancement for FICON that is a little like
the work I did in 1980, but it only claims a 30% improvement over
original FICON.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

which didn't (yet) include SMP support (although it did include a lot of
kernel restructure needed by SMP support) ... somehow or another AT&T
longlines was able to get a copy of this CSC/VM system.

In early 80s, the IBM national rep for AT&T tracked me down to ask me if
I could help AT&T migrate off that CSC/VM systems (to latest vm370 w/smp
support, over the years, AT&T propated CSC/VM to a number of datacenters
and migrated it to latest mainframe processors). Come early 80s & the
latest 3081 mainframe ... was originally planned to no longer be offered
in single processor configurations. There was concern that AT&T would be
forced to (buy &) move (that nearly decade old) CSC/VM to non-IBM clone
mainframes (which still offerred single processor configurations)

before the BAYBUNCH meeting last night, we went up and did a customer
call on DIALOG (& got to see the AS9000). While we were there xxxxx
called & I talked to him for a while. I happened to mention the NAS
headhunter call & the details -- coincidence it was the day before I was
to call on DIALOG & see the AS 9000. He said that DIALOG would offer a
much better deal. DIALOG is currently part of a Lockheed division.
DIALOG has around 120 people, the whole division has around 20,000
people, but last year DIALOG accounted for 40% of the division
profits. Right now DIALOG is in the process of breaking off & becoming a
subsidiary. They will be offering substantial profit sharing deals.

they also had something like 320 disk drives (200mbyte, 3330-11,
64gbyte). AS9000 was ibm mainframe clone built by Hitachi and marketed
in the US by NAS.

Reference in the above, head hunter had called asking me to interview
for technical assistant to President of NAS. I was sitting in office of
the executive that ran Dialog and former co-worker called him, and the
executive handed phone to me, former co-worker mentioned that DIALOG
would make me a much better offer. BAYBUNCH was local monthly technical
meeting hosted at SLAC.

ACP/TPF (airline control program) still didn't have SMP support and IBM
also worrying that market would all migrate to clone mainframes (that
still offered single processor configurations). Eventually IBM did come
out with 3083 (primarily because of ACP/TPF market) ... which was
basically 3081 with one processor removed (there was issue that
processor0 was at top of box and processor1 was in the middle, easiest
would have been to remove processor1, but that would have left the box
dangerously top heavy).

After some time, around 1970, the concept of virtual machines (VMs)
was created.

mid-60s, some of the CTSS people went to 5th flr to do MULTICS
... others went to the ibm science center on the 4th flr and did
cp40/cms (after having done the hardware modifications to add virtual
memory to 360/40). cp40/cms morphs into cp67/cms when 360/67 that came
standard with virtual memory becomes available in 1967.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech

transition to online available 7x24 was an issue since machine useage
offshift from home was quite variable ... and ibm mainframe even sitting
idle (but available) was quite expensive. lots of work was done on cp67
to support darkroom, unattended operation ... to minimize offshift costs
when (especially initally) there was little useage (but in order to
promote offshift useage, system had to be up 7x24).

this was also in the days when systems were rented ... and monthly
charges was based on the "system meter" that ran whenever the processor
and/or (any) channel was executing (processor and all channel activity
had to be idle for at least 400ms before system meter stopped). cp67 did
some special programming so that channel would go idle ... but instantly
wake up whenever there was any arriving characters ... further reducing
offshift costs when idle. Trivia: long after the shift from rent/leased
to sales ... MVS still had a timer task that woke up every 400ms (making
sure that system meter never stopped).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#online

The science center offered online service both internal and to
students/staff/professors at local univ. in cambridge area. One of the
issues was highest security since some of the internal users were
Armonk business planners which had loaded the most valuable and
sensitive corporate data on the system ... and the system was also
being used by non-employees from local universities.

CP67/CMS was also being used by various gov. agencies. I was
undergraduate at the time but doing extenive CP67/CMS changes ... and
would even periodically get requests from IBM for enhancements. I
didn't know about it at the time, but some of the (security related)
requests from IBM may have actually originated from gov. agencies
(although I didn't find out about them until much later). gone 404,
but still lives free at the wayback machine:
http://web.archive.org/web/20090117083033/http://www.nsa.gov/research/selinux/list-archive/0409/8362.shtml

even before I graduated, Boeing hired me full time to help with the
formation of Boeing Computer Serivces ... consolidate all of
dataprocessing in an independent business unit to better monetize the
investment (including offering services to non-Boeing
entities). Boeing Renton had somewhere around $300M (late 60s $$s) in
IBM mainframes ... 360/65s were arriving faster than they could be
installed ... and were in the processor of replicating Renton
datacenter at Paine Field (for disaster survival).

late 70s/early 80s customers bought large number of 4300s. datacenter
4300 clusters had more aggregate processing & i/o than high-end
mainframes at significant lower cost, smaller footprint, lower power
useage and environmental requirements. large customers also had orders
of 4300 in hundreds at a time for placing out in departmental areas
(sort of the leading edge of the distributed computing tsunami). In
1979, I was asked to do 4341 benchmarks for LLNL that was looking at
getting 70 4341s for compute farm ... a leading edge of the coming
cluster supercomputers.

{wtf} Tymshare SuperBasic Source Code

pechter@pechter.dyndns.org (William Pechter) writes:
The company head was Daniel Sinnott Sr. who also founded Interdata in
1966 (which later became part of Perkin-Elmer Data Systems and then
spun off to Concurrent Computer).

jan 1968 to install cp67 at the univ. I did a lot of enhancements for
cp67 as undergraduate at the univ ... including added tty terminal
support. I tried to make the ibm terminal controller do some stuff that
it couldn't quite do. somewhat as a result, the univ. starts a clone
controller project ... interdate/3 programmed to emulate ibm controller
and build hardware channel interface board. This then evolves into
interdata/4 for the channel interface with multiple interdata/3s
handling line/port scanner function. Interdata starts marketing it into
ibm market ... and four of us get written up as responsible for (some
part of) clone controller market. It continued to be sold under
perkin/elmer name (after buying interdata). some past posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#360pcm

I run into one of the boxes at large mid-atlantic datacenter around turn
of the century handling majority of dialup point-of-sale terminal
transactions for the east coast.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Milton Friedman's Cherished Theory Is Laid to Rest
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-01-12/milton-friedman-s-cherished-theory-is-laid-to-rest
Even now, when economic models have become far more complex than
anything in Friedman's time, economists still go back to Friedman's
theory as a mental touchstone -- a fundamental intuition that guides
the way they make their models. My first macroeconomics professor
believed in it deeply and instinctively, and would even bring it up in
department seminars.

... snip ...

"The Undoing Project" goes into some detail how Kahneman and Tversky
disproved Economists' assumption that people make rational decisions
... getting Kahneman (a psychologist) Nobel Prize in economics.
loc:1155-59:
He had listened to an American economist talk about how so-and-so was
stupid and so-and-so was a fool, then said, "All your economic models
are premised on people being smart and rational, and yet all the
people you know are idiots."

Milton Friedman's Cherished Theory Is Laid to Rest
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-01-12/milton-friedman-s-cherished-theory-is-laid-to-rest
Even now, when economic models have become far more complex than
anything in Friedman's time, economists still go back to Friedman's
theory as a mental touchstone -- a fundamental intuition that guides
the way they make their models. My first macroeconomics professor
believed in it deeply and instinctively, and would even bring it up in
department seminars.

... snip ...

"The Undoing Project" goes into some detail how Kahneman and Tversky
disproved Economists' assumption that people make rational decisions
... getting Kahneman (a psychologist) Nobel Prize in
economics. loc:1155-59:
He had listened to an American economist talk about how so-and-so was
stupid and so-and-so was a fool, then said, "All your economic models
are premised on people being smart and rational, and yet all the
people you know are idiots."

... snip ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman
Friedman promoted an alternative macroeconomic viewpoint known as
"monetarism", and argued that a steady, small expansion of the money
supply was the preferred policy.[12] His ideas concerning monetary
policy, taxation, privatization and deregulation influenced government
policies, especially during the 1980s.

... snip ...

which corresponds to the beginning destruction of the middle class as
well as the S&L crisis.

"Confidence Men" has a civil engineering professor talking to Volcker
about last several decades civil engineering programs at univ. being
eliminated (lack of building programs, lack of jobs for civil
engineering graduates, no jobs means drop off in students) ... and
Volcker responds: "Well, I said, 'The trouble with the United States
recently is we spent several decades not producing many civil
engineers and producing a huge number of financial engineers. And the
result is s*tty bridges and a s*tty financial system!". Some number of
recent US rebuild projects have gone to companies from foreign
countries that are still producing civil engineering graduates.

The original S&L regulator refused to go along with the requests. He
was then asked to resign so the president could appoint somebody that
would go along. This goes into it
http://www.amazon.com/Two-Trillion-Dollar-Meltdown-Rollers-ebook/dp/B0097DE7DM/including loc655-67:
By the time Pratt had finished, it was possible for a single
individual to take control of an S&L, then organize and lend to
multiple subsidiaries -- for land acquisition, construction, building
management, and the like -- and create his own small real estate
empire entirely with depositors' money.

another family member then presides over the economic mess 70 times
larger than the S&L crisis. S&L crisis had 1000 criminal convictions
with jailtime, proportionally the economic mess should have 70,000.

Some of the "Tobacco Smoke"/"Global Warning" (merchants of doubt)
scientists were also involved with Team B, helping spin over
estimating enemy capability. When director of CIA won't agree to "Team
B" Soviet analysis justifying huge increase in military spending, he
is replaced by somebody that would (who later becomes VP and then
President)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_B

Rumsfeld white house chief of staff (74-75), after replacing CIA
director, he becomes SECDEF (75-77), and replaced by one of his
staffers, Dick Cheney. He is again SECDEF 2001-2006
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Rumsfeld

When Rumsfeld was white house chief of staff 74-75, Cheney was on his
staff. Cheney then becomes white house chief of staff when Rumsfeld
becomes SECDEF. Cheney is then SECDEF from 89-93 and VP 2001-2009
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Cheney

one of the "Team B" members
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Wolfowitz
He is a leading neoconservative.[4] As Deputy Secretary of Defense, he
was "a major architect of President Bush's Iraq policy and ... its
most hawkish advocate."[5] In fact, "the Bush Doctrine was largely
[his] handiwork".

note, I've previously referenced, large public clouds have also done
enormous work on the efficiency and economics so that they can serve
elastic on-demand, possibly having 80%-90% idle (zero electricity
& cooling, instant on) ... just so they can have capacity for peak
demand.

we were doing commercial/DBMS and sicentific/technical cluster scaleup
as part of our (ibm) HA/CMP product. reference to Jan1992 meeting in
Ellison's conference room on commercial/DBMS cluster scaleup
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13

... which contributes to our decision to leave. Later, two of the
other people in the Ellison meeting have also left and are at a small
client/server startup responsible for something called "commerce
server". We are brought in because they want to do payment
transactions on the server. The startup had also invented this
technology they called "SSL" they wanted to use; the result is now
frequently called "electronic commerce".

At the time, the payment industry was primarily circuit-based with
end-to-end diagnostics and trouble desk was expected to do 1st level
problem determination within 5mins. Early "electronic commerce" pilot
was large sporting goods vendor that advertised during NFL
half-time. An early trouble call was closed as "NTF" (no trouble
found) after 3hrs of investigation. I had to document a lot of
processes and craft software to try and bring a packet-oriented
infrastructure up to the level of what the payment industry expected
from circuit-based infrastructure (I also had complete authority over
the server to payment network gateway operation ... but could only
make recommendations over the client/server operation ... some of
which were almost immediately violated and continue to account for
some number of exploits).

A couple of other observations

1) the platforms used for servers had come from an interactive
environments ... which grewup assuming everything was done interacting
with user ... and problems just frequently "punted" back to the
user. Mainframes tended to assume there was no responsible human
interaction and for decades developed hueristics to (automagically)
try and handle issues (at the time, much better suited for dark room
server operation).

2) I would claim that it takes 4-10 times the effort to take a well
designed, implemented and tested application and turn it into a
service (in part develop adhoc hueristics to handle lots of
situations).

In this period there was lots of work on object-oriented operating
systems ... for instance Apple had "pink" and Sun had "spring" (at one
point I was asked if I would consider heading up an effort to turn
"spring" out as commercial product). "pink" somewhat morphs into
application development environment which Apple spins off as
Taligent. I had one week JAD with Taligent to look at what it would
take to enhance their application development environment for services
... after a week the estimate was it would be 1/3rd hit to all their
existing object Frameworks and a couple new Frameworks (never went
further than that).

we did eventually find a object-oriented application development
company that did fixed-priced commercial services ... it was founded by
the person that formally was head of the 60s IBM FAA air traffic
control project.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

In the early 70s, at the science center, I felt that I could do anything
that the multics people on the 5th flr were doing, I could do
performance, dynamic adaptive resource management, paging algorithms,
page-mapped filesystems, etc. IT wasn't fair to compare Multics customers
against cp67/vm370 customers, or even against the number of internal
corporate cp67/vm370 customers. However, one of my hobbies was producing
& supporting enhanced operating systems for iternal corporate
datacenters (CSC/VM). For a time, CSC/VM had about 50% more internal
installations than the total number of MULTICS installations that ever
existed
http://www.multicians.org/sites.html

offered RAMIS from Mathematica Products Group
http://www.decosta.com/Nomad/tales/history.html
In 1973, NCSS decided to fund the development of an alternative product,
which in October of 1975 was released under the name NOMAD. That same
month, Gerry Cohen left Mathematica and released a product called FOCUS,
which he made available on Tymshare Inc's competing time-sharing system,
with the promise to RAMIS users that their applications could run
un-modified, and at a significant discount over NCSS' charges for RAMIS
applications.

...
A blow to the mathematical version of the theory came in 2006, when
Georgetown economists Matthew Canzoneri, Robert Cumby and Behzad Diba
wrote a paper testing the consumption Euler equation directly against
real financial data -- something that, for reasons that escape me, no
economist seems to have actually tried before. The equation says that
when interest rates are high, people save more and consume less --
this is the way they smooth their consumption, as Friedman
predicted. But Canzoneri et al. found that the opposite is true -- for
whatever reason, the fact is that people tend to consume more when
rates are high.

...
So it's not much of an exaggeration to say that Friedman's PIH is the
cornerstone of modern macroeconomic theory. Unfortunately, there's
just one small problem -- it's almost certainly wrong.

Savage and the economist Milton Friedman wrote in 1948, the proper
analogy was to an expert billiards player who didn't know the
mathematical formulas governing how one ball would carom off another
but "made his shots as if he knew the formulas."

Somewhat amazingly, that's where economists left things for more than
30 years. It wasn't that they thought everybody made perfect
probability calculations; they simply believed that in free markets,
rational behavior would usually prevail.

....
In fact our research only showed that humans are not well described by
the rational-agent model." And so a new set of decision scholars began
to examine whether those shortcuts our brains take are actually all
that irrational."

2002 (republican) congress lets fiscal responsibility act (from
earlier republican congress, spending can't exceed tax revenue, on its
way to eliminating all federal debt) expire. 2010, CBO report was that
2003-2009 tax revenue was cut by $6T and spending increased by $6T for
$12T budget gap compared to fiscal responsible budget (nearly
$2T/yr). 2005, US Comptroller General was including in speeches that
nobody in congress was capable of middle school arithmetic (for how
badly they were savaging the budget). since then spending has been
cut, but taxes not restored, so debt continues to increase; problem
also is that interest on the debt is approaching .5T/yr.

One of the issues is that most would refer to the whole nearly $20T
... but recently some in congress have started only referring to the
debt as the amount not borrowed from the SS Trust Fund (creating
appearance that they are getting ready to mount a program to stiff the
SS Trust Fund).

Stockman (80s republican budget director) claims credit for
accelerating increase in contributions to SS Trust Fund (that
completely covers baby boomer obligations) because he wanted to
"borrow" it for DOD spending ... w/o appearing to increase taxes
(although it pushes it into the future because taxes will have to be
increased at some point in order to pay back what is owed the SS Trust
Fund for baby boomer pension obligations).

Stockman also claims credit for starting to tax social security
benefits ... effectively increasing amount of taxes collected (w/o
appearing to raise taxes). The issue is that SS contributions are
"after tax" contributions (taxes already paid at time SS contributions
are collected) ... and now are being taxed again when the benefits are
paid out.

disclaimer: 1999 I was asked to try and help prevent the coming
economic mess by improving the integrity of securitized mortgages
supporting documents. For reasons that I still don't completely
understand, I was (also) invited to the homes of both the original 80s
S&L regulator that was asked to resign (because he didn't "go along")
and his replacement. past posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#s&l.crisis

Securitized mortgages had been used during the S&L crisis to obfuscate
fraudulent mortgages (posterchild was office bldgs in Dallus/FtWorth
that turn out to be empty lots). Then last decade, they find that they
can pay rating agencies for triple-A ratings (when rating agencies
knew that they aren't worth triple-A, from Oct2008 congressional
testimony). Triple-A rating trumps supporting documentation and they
can start doing no-documentation liar loans. It was major factor in
being able to do over $27T 2001-2008 (especially selling to
institutions restricted to dealing only in "safe" investments, like
large pension funds). From the law of unintended consequences, the
largest TBTF economic mess fines so far are for the robo-signing mills
fabricating the missing documents. past posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#toxic.cdo

There was also facade that $700B TARP funds were appropriated to buy
the TBTF offbook toxic assets, but just the four largest TBTF were
still carrying $5.2T ye2008. Jan2009 there was news about it was too
hard to evaluate these offbook toxic assets for purchase (with TARP
funds) ... but is was "too hard" because they were no-documentation,
liar loans (also several tens of billions in offbook toxic assets had
gone for 22cents on the dollar late summer 2008; if the offbook toxic
assets had been brought back on the books at that price, the TBTF
would had been declared insolvent and forced to be liquidated, just 4
largest TBTF @22cents/dollar would have booked $4T in losses). In any
case, TARP was used for other purposes and the FED bought trillions in
offbook toxic assets at 98cents on the dollar and provided tens of
trillions in ZIRP funds. FED fought long hard legal battle to prevent
disclosure of what they were doing. When they lost, the FED Chairman
held press conference to say that he thought the TBTF would use the
ZIRP funds to help mainstreet, when they didn't, he had no way to
force them (but that didn't stop the ZIRP fund and claims that TBTF
have since been clearing $300B/annum from ZIRP funds).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_interest-rate_policyhttp://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/1201/Federal-Reserve-s-astounding-report-We-loaned-banks-trillionspast posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#zirp

Paying for triple-A (and immediately selling everything off), allowed
lenders no longer to care about borrower's qualification and/or loan
quality. Then they found they could design securitized mortgages to
fail, pay for triple-A, sell to their victims and take-out CDS
gambling debts that they would fail (now they cared about loan
quality, but not exactly as you would expect). The largest holder of
CDS gambling bets was AIG. AIG was negotiating to payoff at 50cents on
the dollar when the SECTREAS steps in and has them sign a document
that they can't sue those making the gambling bets and to take TARP
funds to pay off at face value. The largest recipient of TARP funds
was AIG and the largest recipient of face value payoffs was firm
formerly headed by SECTREAS.

Also from Jan2009 (decade after being asked to help try to prevent the
coming economic mess), I was asked to HTML'ize the Pecora Hearings
(30s congressional hearings into '29crash, resulted
in Glass-Steagall Act and criminal convictions) with lots of
internal HREFs and URLs between what happened this time and what
happened then (comments that the new congress might have appetite to
do something). I work on it for awhile and then get a call that it
won't be needed after all (comments about enormous mountains of
wallstreet cash totally burying capital hill). past posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#Pecora&/orGlass-Steagall

Also from the law of unintended consequences, the original rheteric on
the floor of congress was that the purpose of GLBA (before repeal of
Glass-Steagall and other additions) was if you already had banking
charter, you got to keep it, if you didn't, you couldn't get one
(blocking competition with new more efficient and cost-effective
technologies, folklore is that wallstreet paid $250M for GLBA, evenly
divided between the two parties). Then when FED was handing out ZIRP
funds, they had to give out banking charters to some of their friends
that didn't already have them (theoritically in violation of GLBA).

But I think adventure kicked in. My great, great, great grandfather
probably wasn't "poor" but he came over from Scotland to "make a
fortune" and the plan had been to return. Teaching school didn't work
out, so he got into the fur trade, he did well, but I don't think he
had any real background for it.

I mentioned it before, a few years back there was a book about how
people from Scotland have influenced the rest of the world (all those
"Scottish engineers"), yet they went for the work, rather than a
better life, and there was less back in Scotland to drive them out.
It's not like the Irish famine.

recent facebook thread ... started out on separation of church and
state, jefferson versus hamilton ... then got into "leet-men" (from
crown charter, Virginia, Maryland, and Carolina, escaping was punishable
by death), "Why Nations Fail", pg27:
The clauses of the Fundamental Constitutions laid out a rigid social
structure. At the bottom were the "leet-men," with clause 23 noting,
"All the children of leet-men shall be leet-men, and so to all
generations."

The Irish Slave Trade - The Forgotten "White" Slaves
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-irish-slave-trade-the-forgotten-white-slaves/31076
From 1641 to 1652, over 500,000 Irish were killed by the English and
another 300,000 were sold as slaves. Ireland's population fell
from about 1,500,000 to 600,000 in one single decade. Families were
ripped apart as the British did not allow Irish dads to take their
wives and children with them across the Atlantic. This led to a
helpless population of homeless women and children. Britain's
solution was to auction them off as well.

Had watched DVD of BBC "great britain" history program that included
English invading Scotland, confiscating much of the property, men that
weren't killed were kicked off their land. Other than immigrating, about
the only thing left for them was to enlist in the military ... later saw
black adder rerun that had the line about when english see a man in a
skirt, they run him through and nik his land.

... my wife's scottish "clan" had been "broken" in 1600s, then moved to
ireland before moving on to the new world.

disclaimer: 1999 I was asked to try and help prevent the coming
economic mess by improving the integrity of securitized mortgages
supporting documents. Securitized mortgages had been used during the
S&L crisis to obfuscate fraudulent mortgages (posterchild was
office bldgs in Dallus/FtWorth that turn out to be empty lots). Then
last decade, they find that they can pay rating agencies for triple-A
ratings (when rating agencies knew that they aren't worth triple-A,
from Oct2008 congressional testimony). Triple-A rating trumps
supporting documentation and they can start doing no-documentation
liar loans. It was major factor in being able to do over $27T
2001-2008 (especially selling to institutions restricted to dealing
only in "safe" investments, like large pension funds). From the law of
unintended consequences, the largest TBTF economic mess fines
so far are for the robo-signing mills fabricating the missing
documents. some posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#toxic.cdoand
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#s&l.crisis

There was also facade that $700B TARP funds were appropriated to buy
the TBTF offbook toxic assets, but just the four largest TBTF were
still carrying $5.2T ye2008. Jan2009 there was news about it was too
hard to evaluate these offbook toxic assets for purchase (with TARP
funds) ... but it was "too hard" because they were no-documentation,
liar loans (also several tens of billions in offbook toxic assets had
gone for 22cents on the dollar late summer 2008; if the offbook toxic
assets had been brought back on the books at that price, the TBTF
would had been declared insolvent and forced to be liquidated, just 4
largest TBTF @22cents/dollar would have booked $4T in losses). In any
case, TARP was used for other purposes and the FED bought trillions in
offbook toxic assets at 98cents on the dollar and provided tens of
trillions in ZIRP funds. FED fought long hard legal battle to prevent
disclosure of what they were doing. When they lost, the FED Chairman
held press conference to say that he thought the TBTF would use the
ZIRP funds to help mainstreet, when they didn't, he had no way
to force them (but that didn't stop the ZIRP fund and claims
that TBTF have since been clearing $300B/annum from ZIRP
funds).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_interest-rate_policyhttp://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/1201/Federal-Reserve-s-astounding-report-We-loaned-banks-trillions

Paying for triple-A (and immediately selling everything off), allowed
lenders no longer to care about borrower's qualification and/or loan
quality. Then they found they could design securitized mortgages to
fail, pay for triple-A, sell to their victims and take-out CDS
gambling debts that they would fail (now they cared about loan
quality, but not exactly as you would expect). The largest holder of
CDS gambling bets was AIG. AIG was negotiating to payoff at 50cents on
the dollar when the SECTREAS steps in and has them sign a document
that they can't sue those making the gambling bets and to take TARP
funds to pay off at face value. The largest recipient of TARP funds
was AIG and the largest recipient of face value payoffs was firm
formerly headed by SECTREAS.

Also from Jan2009 (decade after being asked to help try to prevent the
coming economic mess), I was asked to HTML'ize the Pecora Hearings
(30s congressional hearings into '29crash, resulted
in Glass-Steagall Act and criminal convictions) with lots of
internal HREFs and URLs between what happened this time and what
happened then (comments that the new congress might have appetite to
do something). I work on it for awhile and then get a call that it
won't be needed after all (comments about enormous mountains of
wallstreet cash totally burying capital hill). some posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#Pecora&/orGlass-Steagall

Also from the law of unintended consequences, the original rheteric on
the floor of congress was that the purpose of GLBA (before repeal of
Glass-Steagall and other additions) was if you already had banking
charter, you got to keep it, if you didn't, you couldn't get one
(blocking competition with new more efficient and cost-effective
technologies, folklore is that wallstreet paid $250M for GLBA, evenly
divided between the two parties). Then when FED was handing out ZIRP
funds, they had to give out banking charters to some of their friends
that didn't already have them (theoritically in violation of GLBA).

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

If economists want to be trusted again, they should learn to tell jokes

loc72-74:
Only through having been caught so blatantly with their noses in the
troughs (e.g. the 2011 Academy Award–winning documentary Inside Job)
has the American Economic Association finally been forced to adopt an
ethical code, and that code is weak and incomplete compared with other
disciplines.

loc1193-95:
According to economists' estimates, such collusion between asset
management firms and companies is robbing a large proportion of the
retirees of the company of a noticeable share of their retirement
benefits. Losses for investors in small fund families with large
401(k) plans can reach more than 13 percent (Cohen and Schmidt 2009).

loc1200-1206:
There are plenty of examples from other countries to copy: the US
individual retirement account system is based on the Chilean pension
reform of 1980/81 that in turn was based heavily on proposals made in
the book Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman. In response to the
Chilean system facing a likely collapse in a few decades time, it was
substantially overhauled in 2008 to require mandatory participation of
all citizens in exchange for universal pension coverage.

... snip ...

Note the book starts out with cases of major universities firing and
blackballing economists over the years, that happen to write papers
that the rich&powerful found objectionable

from the review on Amazon:
This is a book full of surprises and revelations -- the accidental
beginnings of the 401(k) plan, with disastrous economic consequences
for many; the major policy changes that began under Jimmy Carter; how
the New Economy disrupted America's engine of shared prosperity, the
"virtuous circle" of growth, and how America lost the title of "Land
of Opportunity." Smith documents the transfer of $6 trillion in
middle-class wealth from homeowners to banks even before the housing
boom went bust, and how the U.S. policy tilt favoring the rich is
stunting America's economic growth.

corporations are people, "city of london" has some 9k "human" voters
and some 32k "corporate" voters (one of the things they don't bring
up is how hard it is to create corporations, effectively as a form
of voter box stuffing) pg71/loc1477-79:
The City's nine thousand-odd human residents have one vote each in
municipal elections here. But businesses in the City vote too, as if
they were human, with thirty-two thousand corporate votes. 25 In effect,
Goldman Sachs, the Bank of China, Moscow Narodny Bank, and KPMG can vote
in a hugely important British election.

Possibly because even GAO didn't believe SEC was doing anything, it
started doing reports of public company fraudulent financial filings
... even showing uptic after SOX goes into effect (and nobody doing
jailtime). Less well known is that SOX also included provision that
SEC do something about the rating agencies (but SEC did about as much
about rating agencies as they did about the fraudulent financial
filings).

Spring of 2008, some investors started to realize that it was possible
to buy ratings and possibly no ratings could be trusted ... leading to
freezing the muni-bond market. Warren Buffett then steps in offering
muni-bond insurance to unfreeze the market.

Paper tape (was Re: Hidden Figures)

edgould1948@COMCAST.NET (Edward Gould) writes:
That is not how I remember it at all. The Carriage tape on a
1403/3211(?) was just for that machine. i.e. skip to channel x As I
have said before I do not ever remember seeing any IBM device or
computer that had a paper tape reader/writer. This goes back to the
360's . I just got off the phone with a friend and he does not
remember it for the 14xx either.

IBM reference
https://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/reference/glossary_1.html
1050 [2] The 1050 system consisted of the 1051 control unit, 1052
printer-keyboard, 1053 printer, 1054 paper tape reader, 1055 paper tape
punch and 1056 card reader. These various components were withdrawn from
marketing between February 1974 and June 1978.

Paper tape (was Re: Hidden Figures)

charlesm@MCN.ORG (Charles Mills) writes:
And 1443 (?). I had a client that had a 1403 variant that was a little
slower but included a 16-or-so column card reader. You could print
invoices on pre-punched cards and read the punching to make sure you
were printing on the right card (no spool, obviously). It printed on
"160-column" cards, that is, two 80-column cards with a tearable fold
in the middle. One-half was the document the customer returned with a
check; one half was for his records.

1401 was a processor, not a printer, the "commercial" machine that
preceded the 360, the "all-purpose" computer. (70xx was the
"scientific" series.)

Agree on the 3211.

There is just zero doubt in my mind that the 1403 printer used a
"special" (not TTY-like) paper tape, solely for carriage control, not
"data."

A Google data center consists of thousands of server machines connected
to a local network. Both the server boards and the networking equipment
are custom-designed by Google. We vet component vendors we work with and
choose components with care, while working with vendors to audit and
validate the security properties provided by the components. We also
design custom chips, including a hardware security chip that is
currently being deployed on both servers and peripherals. These chips
allow us to securely identify and authenticate legitimate Google devices
at the hardware level.

... snip ...

there is stuff about authentication chip in these patents ... started
out for payments ... but then evolved into generalized use with any kind
of situation/paradigm requiring authentication
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadssummary.htm

guy heading up TPM is in the front row, so I quip that it is nice to see
that the TPM is starting to look more & more like my chip, he quips back
that I don't have 200 people helping me with the design. other related
posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/x959.html#aadsstraw

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

When chair of CFTC suggested regulating derivatives (heavily used by
ENRON), the chair was replaced by the "#2's" wife while the Senator
got legislation passed preventing derivative regulation, the wife then
resigns and joins ENRON board and audit committee.

1999 I was asked to try and help prevent the coming economic mess by
improving integrity of securitized mortgage supporting documents;
securitized mortgages had been used during S&L crisis to obfuscate
fraudulent mortgages (posterchild were office bldgs in Dallas/Ft.Worth
that turn out to be empty lots). S&L crisis
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#s&l.crisis

Later sellers find they can buy triple-A rating for securitized
mortgages (even when rating agencies knew they weren't worth triple-A,
from Oct2008 congressional testimony, largely enabling over $27T done
2001-2008, "triple-A rating" trumps supporting documents and they can
start doing no-documentation, liar loans), goes from not caring about
loan quality and borrower's qualifications to doing triple-A rated
CDOs designed to fail, pay for triple-A, sell to their victims, and
then take out CDS/derivative gambling bets that they would fail
(creating enormous demand for bad loans). (triple-A rated) toxic CDOshttp://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#toxic.cdo

The largest holder of the CDS/derivative gambling bets was AIG and
negotiating to pay off at 50cents on the dollar when the secretary of
treasury steps in and says that they have to sign a document that they
can't sue those making the gambling bets and forced to take TARP funds
to pay off the CDS gambling bets at face value. The largest recipient
of TARP funds is AIG and the largest recipient of face value payoffs
is the firm formally headed by the secretary of treasury.

Jan2009 I'm asked to HTML'ize the Pecora Hearings (senate hearings
from the 30s into '29 crash that resulted in criminal convictions and
Glass-Steagall, had been scanned fall of 2008) with lots of internal
xrefs and URLs between what happened this time and what happened then
(comments that the new congress might have appetite to do
something). I work on it for awhile and then get a call that it won't
be needed after all (comments about enormous mountains of wallstreet
cash burying capital hill). some posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#Pecora&/orGlass-Steagall

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

A Google data center consists of thousands of server machines connected
to a local network. Both the server boards and the networking equipment
are custom-designed by Google. We vet component vendors we work with and
choose components with care, while working with vendors to audit and
validate the security properties provided by the components. We also
design custom chips, including a hardware security chip that is
currently being deployed on both servers and peripherals. These chips
allow us to securely identify and authenticate legitimate Google devices
at the hardware level.

... snip ...

there is stuff about authentication chip in these patents ... started
out for payments ... but then evolved into generalized use with any kind
of situation/paradigm requiring authentication
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadssummary.htm

guy heading up TPM is in the front row, so I quip that it is nice to see
that the TPM is starting to look more & more like my chip, he quips back
that I don't have 200 people helping me with the design. other related
posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/x959.html#aadsstraw

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

2002, republican congress lets the fiscal responsibility act (spending
can't exceed tax revenue, on its way to eliminating all federal debt,
from earlier republican congress) lapse. 2010 CBO report that
2003-2009, tax revenue cut by $6T and spending increased by $6T or
$12T gab compared to fiscal responsible budget (nearly
$2T/year). since then taxes haven't been restored and only modest
reductions in spending so debt continues to increase.

Baby Boomers (birth boom) is characterized as being four times as
large as the previous generation and twice as large as the following
generation. During peak working years, baby boomers were contributing
more to SS Trust Fund (building up principal for their retirement)
than benefits were being paid out to the previous generations. Past
administrations have been using that principal to pay for other
things. With baby boomers retirement the situation will flip and baby
boomer benefits will exceed contributions by the following
generations. So there is big upfront requirement to pay down the debt,
restoring the baby boomer principal in the SS Trust Fund.

However, last decade there was also other major diversion of
infrastructure funds for other purposes. There is another $1T/yr
increase in tax revenue required (or $3T/year increase in tax revenue)
just to restore status quo to fiscal responsibility act.

At IBM, net operating earnings account for 70% percent of the senior
executives' performance-based incentives, with the remaining 30% based
on free cash flow, according to the company's proxy statement. This is
a juicy, multimillion dollar carrot dangling in front of the top brass
at IBM, galvanizing them to focus on boosting earnings per share - for
which there is a shortcut: buying back company stock. When a company
repurchases its own stock, it is reducing the number of outstanding
shares in the market, artificially boosting earnings per share and, in
turn, padding executives' pockets.

The congressional Madoff hearings had testimony from the person that
had tried unsuccessfully for a decade to get SEC to do something about
Madoff. He was asked if new regulations were needed, he replied that
while new regulations might be needed, much more important would be
transparency (since SEC was doing little about regulations any way,
note: SEC hands were forced when Madoff turned himself in).

With respect to Sarbanes-Oxley, he pointed out that
whistleblowers/tips turn up 13 times more fraud than audits and while
SEC had a 1-800 number for corporations to complain about audits, but
didn't have a whistleblower/tip line.

In the 90s, WU wasn't doing so well and was acquired by First
Financial. It the late 90s, WU become part of FDC with the merger of
First Financial and FDC. However with the enormous increase in illegal
workers after 2000, WU business exploded and by 2005 it was half of
FDC's bottom line. Possibly in part because the President of Mexico
invited FDC executives to visit Mexico to be thrown in jail, WU was
spun off in 2005.

In theory, "deferred prosecution" with just fines ... is suppose to
throw the book at them if repeated ... however there have been a
significant number of repeated "deferred prosecution" cases across the
financial industry (especially TBTF) effectively ignoring previous
offenses. It isn't just money laundering for drug cartels and
terrorists, but also economic mess, manipulating LIBOR, FOREX,
commodity markets, tax evasion, robo-signing mills fabricating
mortgage document, selling securitized mortgages created to fail and
other criminal activities. The joke has become that it is just part of
the cost of running criminal enterprise.

I was computer geek as undergraduate and the univ. hires me fulltime
to be responsible for their systems (started with 709+1401 and
transitioned to 360/67 ... although most of the time ran as 360/65
with os/360). Then while still undergraduate, Boeing hires me fulltime
for small corporate hdqtrs group to help with the formation of Boeing
Computer Services (consolidate Boeing dataprocessing into independent
business unit to better monetize the investment, including offering
services to non-Boeing entities, sort of early cloud operation
... just Renton datacenter had something like $300M in 360s ... 60s
dollars, for a time, 360/65s were arriving faster than they could be
installed, 747#3 was flying the skies of seattle getting FAA
certification).

Boeing told story at 360 announce Boeing ordered a whole boatload of
360s from a salesman that didn't know what 360 was. IBM sales was on
straight commission and the salesman earned more than the executives
... prompting IBM to eventually change to quota system. After change
to quota, Boeing ordered a whole bunch more 360s and salesman made
quota by the end of January and they adjust his quota ... and he
leaves.

I thot Renton was possibly largest IBM datacenter in the world
... however calculation was that being w/o Renton for a week would
cost the company more than the Renton datacenter ... there was
disaster scenario where Mt. Rainier heats up and the mud slide takes
out the Renton datacenter ... so they were preparing to replicate it
at the new 747 plant up at Paine field.

Later I would sponsor John Boyd's briefings at IBM. Boyd had been very
vocal about sensors across trail in Vietnam wouldn't work ... possibly
as punishment he was put in command of spook base (about the time I
was at Boeing). His biography describes spook base as $2.5B windfall
for IBM (compared to $300M for Renton, which possibly helped offset
the enormous amounts dumped down the hole with Future System project).

Univ. had gotten a 360/30 to replace 1401 as part of transition to
360/67. 1401 ran MPIO which did card->tape and tape->printer/punch
front end to 709 (that ran tape->tape). The 360/30 had 1401 hardware
emaulation and coule run MPIO directly. My 1st job was to rewrite MPIO
for 360/30 from scratch. Got to design & implement my own monitor,
device drivers, interrupt handling, storage management, process
scheduling, etc.

note some of the CTSS people went to the 5th flr to do Multics. Others
went to the ibm science center on the 4th flr and did virtual
machines, internal network, lots of online stuff, lots of performance
stuff. virtual machines, cp40/cms was originally done on 360/40 with
virtual memory hardware modifications. cp40/cms morphs into cp67/cms
when 360/67 with virtual memory standard becomes available.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#54tech

in early 80s, we were working with director of NSF and suppose to get
$20M to interconnect the NSF supercomputer centers. Then congress cuts
the budget, some other things happens and finally NSF releases RFP (in
part based on what we already had running). Internal politics prevent
us from bidding. The director of NSF tries to help by writing the
company a letter (with support from other agencies) but that just
makes the internal politics worse (as does comments that what we
already had running was at least 5yrs ahead of all RFP responses).
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/401444/grid-computing/

triva: in the early 80s we had T1 & faster speed links when we were
working on connecting the NSF supercomputer centers. Finally in the
late 80s the NSF RFP called for T1 links, the winning bid actually put
in 440kbit/sec links and then presumably to make it look like they
were meeting the RFP ... they put in T1 trunks with telco multiplexors
running multiple 440kbit links.

more trivia: GML was invented at the (same) IBM cambridge science
center in 1969, a decade later it morphs into ISO SGML, and after
another decade it morphs into HTML at CERN. The first webserver in the
US is at the CERN sister lab SLAC, on their virtual machine system
(also invented at the IBM cambridge science center in the mid-60s)
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/history/earlyweb/history.shtml

forwarded:
We have a 4361 we recently purchased in running condition from the
original owner in Sacramento. Our plan is to put VM/370 (or possibly
VM/SP, we have an in within IBM who is working on that) on the system
and run it as one of our publicly available online systems. It's
currently configured for DOS/VS.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

How Finance Behaves like a Parasite Toward the Economy

How Finance Behaves like a Parasite Toward the Economy
http://evonomics.com/how-financial-parasites-and-debt-bondage/?utm_content=buffer318b1
If you look at the Forbes 100 or 500 lists of each nation's richest
people, most made their fortunes through insider dealing to obtain
land, mineral rights or monopolies. If you look at American history,
early real estate fortunes were made by insiders bribing the British
Colonial governors. The railroad barrens bribed Congressmen and other
public officials to let them privatize the railroads and rip off the
country.

1999 I was asked to try and help prevent the coming economic mess by
improving integrity of securitized mortgage supporting documents;
securitized mortgages had been used during S&L crisis to obfuscate
fraudulent mortgages (posterchild were office bldgs in Dallas/Ft.Worth
that turn out to be empty lots).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#s&l.crisis

Later sellers find they can buy triple-A rating from rating agencies
for securitized mortgages (even when rating agencies knew they weren't
worth triple-A, from Oct2008 congressional testimony) largely enabling
over $27T done 2001-2008, "triple-A rating" trumps supporting
documents and they can start doing no-documentation, liar loans, no
longer needing to care about borrowers' qualifications or loan
quality. Then they find they can do toxic CDOs designed to fail, pay
for triple-A, sell to their victims, and then take out CDS/derivative
gambling bets that they would fail (creating enormous demand for bad
loans, now they cared about borrowers' qualification but not in the
traditional way).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#toxic.cdo

The largest holder of the CDS/derivative gambling bets was AIG and
negotiating to pay off at 50cents on the dollar when the secretary of
treasury steps in and says that they have to sign a document that they
can't sue those making the gambling bets and forced to take TARP funds
to pay off the CDS gambling bets at face value. The largest recipient
of TARP funds is AIG and the largest recipient of face value payoffs
is the firm formally headed by the secretary of treasury.

Claim is that during the period (2001-2008) "finance" tripled in size
(as percent of GDP, huge skimming off the $27+T). NY state comptroller
also released statistics that wallstreet bonuses spiked over 400%
during the period.

significant increases in "signal processing" improving resolution of
VHF/UHF radar for targeting:
There are also several other techniques that can be used to compress a
radar pulse such as phase shift keying. Indeed, according to
Pietrucha, the technology for pulse compression is decades old and was
taught to Air Force electronic warfare officers during the 1980s. The
computer processing power required for this is negligible by current
standards, Pietrucha said.

... snip ...

some articles that F-35 is compensating for limited offensive by lots
more electronics .... however, the last couple weeks there has been
some written about China also deploying passive radar that can key off
all the transmissions coming from F-35.

2011, there was lots about F35 taking at least 25years from start to
deploy ... and about a decade ago, the chinese danced through defense
networks acquiring detailed specs for dozen advanced weapons programs
.... including F-35. They've had a decade developing their own
versions from the details specs ... but also a decade developing
countermeasures from the detailed F35 specs.

pg71/loc1477-79:
The City's nine thousand-odd human residents have one vote each in
municipal elections here. But businesses in the City vote too, as if
they were human, with thirty-two thousand corporate votes. 25 In effect,
Goldman Sachs, the Bank of China, Moscow Narodny Bank, and KPMG can vote
in a hugely important British election.

... snip ...

one of the issues is how much does it cost to setup additional
corporations ... something like ballot box stuffing (would you have
various corporate interests trying to create more corporate voters
competing other corporate interest) ... not just that corporations are
people and have rights under the constitution ... but they also have the
vote.

another family member then presides over the economic mess 70 times
larger than the S&L crisis. S&L crisis had 1000 criminal convictions
with jailtime, proportionally the economic mess should have 70,000.

the original S&L regulator refused to "go along" and was asked to
resign so the president could appoint somebody that would go along.
http://www.amazon.com/Two-Trillion-Dollar-Meltdown-Rollers-ebook/dp/B0097DE7DM/including loc655-67:
By the time Pratt had finished, it was possible for a single individual
to take control of an S&L, then organize and lend to multiple
subsidiaries -- for land acquisition, construction, building
management, and the like -- and create his own small real estate
empire entirely with depositors' money.

... snip ...

trivia: I was introduced to both the original S&L regulator and his
replacement mentioned above ... apparently as part of being asked to
help and try to prevent the coming economic mess.

from above:
In the today's paradoxical world of maximizing shareholder value,
which Jack Welch himself has called "the dumbest idea in the world",
the situation is the reverse. CEOs and their top managers have massive
incentives to focus most of their attentions on the expectations
market, rather than the real job of running the company producing real
products and services.

from above:
If you review any of the numerous guides prepared for directors of
corporations prepared by law firms and other experts, you won't find a
stipulation for them to maximize shareholder value on the list of
things they are supposed to do. It's not a legal requirement. And
there is a good reason for that.

Directors and officers, broadly speaking, have a duty of care and duty
of loyalty to the corporation. From that flow more specific
obligations under Federal and state law. But notice: those
responsibilities are to the corporation, not to shareholders in
particular.

At IBM, net operating earnings account for 70% percent of the senior
executives' performance-based incentives, with the remaining 30% based
on free cash flow, according to the company's proxy statement. This is
a juicy, multimillion dollar carrot dangling in front of the top brass
at IBM, galvanizing them to focus on boosting earnings per share - for
which there is a shortcut: buying back company stock. When a company
repurchases its own stock, it is reducing the number of outstanding
shares in the market, artificially boosting earnings per share and, in
turn, padding executives' pockets.

... snip ...

I use to sponsor Boyd's briefings at IBM and in briefings, he would
comment about former military officers starting to contaminate US
corporate cultures with their rigid, top-down, command&control
structure (& only those at the very top knew what they were doing).

Scenario is that at entry to WW2, US has to deploy large numbers with
little or no skills and experience ... the rigid, top-down,
command&control structure was used to leverage the few skilled
resources available. Boyd would compare 11% (growing to nearly 20%) US
officers to maintain rigid, top-down command&control structure,
compared to 3% (or less) for German army. Note it wasn't just former
military officers contaminating US corporate culture ... but about the
same time, news articles started to appear that MBAs were starting to
destroy US corporate culture with myopic focus on quarterly results
(possibly some synergy between MBAs and former military officers with
simplistic, single, near-term, quarterly results objective).

trivia: 1990, commandant of Marine Corps leveraged Boyd for make-over
of the corp and still sponsors Boyd meetings at marine corp
university.

& from Stockman's "The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism
in America" pg464/loc9995-10000:
IBM was not the born-again growth machine trumpeted by the mob of Wall
Street momo traders. It was actually a stock buyback contraption on
steroids. During the five years ending in fiscal 2011, the company
spent a staggering $67 billion repurchasing its own shares, a figure
that was equal to 100 percent of its net income.

pg465/10014-17:
Total shareholder distributions, including dividends, amounted to $82
billion, or 122 percent, of net income over this five-year
period. Likewise, during the last five years IBM spent less on capital
investment than its depreciation and amortization charges, and also
shrank its constant dollar spending for research and development by
nearly 2 percent annually.

Comanche Empire

Comanche Empire
http://www.amazon.com/Comanche-Empire-Lamar-Western-History-ebook/dp/B001HZZ05C/
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a Native American
empire rose to dominate the fiercely contested lands of the American
Southwest, the southern Great Plains, and northern Mexico. This
powerful empire, built by the Comanche Indians, eclipsed its various
European rivals in military prowess, political prestige, economic
power, commercial reach, and cultural influence. Yet, until now, the
Comanche empire has gone unrecognized in American history.

... snip ...

... describes very sophisticated nation that frequently was more
capable than the spanish they were dealing with and later played off
the spanish, French, and Americans. First they fell victim to diseases
killing off large percentage of their population. In the later part
of 1800s the US Army decided that they were no match for the warriors
... instead attacking villages, slaughtering non-combatants (women,
children, old men)

Generals South, Generals North: The Commanders of the Civil War Reconsidered
http://www.amazon.com/Generals-South-North-Commanders-Reconsidered-ebook/dp/B012A1WML6/
Despite the mixed results of his approach to cavalry and the moral
ambiguity (in the Indian Wars verging on genocide) of his policy of
waging war on civilians, it cannot be denied that Sheridan was a
superb leader of troops, a fine tactician, and an aggressive fighter,
who was especially effective in forcing Lee to surrender his Army of
Northern Virginia in the closing weeks of the Civil War.

... snip ...

... history written by the winners ... aided by disease and genocide

British originally tried to emulate the Spanish for North America
starting with Jamestown (1607), those sent over had no background in
self-sufficient, planning on enslaving local population, however
natives weren't amenable to enslaving and the settlement
starves. British eventually then started sending over select members
from British Isles as slaves, from crown charters for colonies (part
of what Jefferson was trying to change and fighting against):
The clauses of the Fundamental Constitutions laid out a rigid social
structure. At the bottom were the "leet-men," with clause 23 noting,
"All the children of leet-men shall be leet-men, and so to all
generations."

"As North America developed, English elites tried time and time again
to set up institutions that would heavily restrict the economic and
political rights for all but a privileged few of the inhabitants of
the colony"

something Jefferson thot he had to constantly fight against. Part of
the strategy from Britain ... was that the church had been enlisted to
help maintain rigid social structure. The "Spanish" model they were
trying to emulate:
The full gamut of encomienda, mita, repartimiento, and trajin was
designed to force indigenous people's living standards down to a
subsistence level and thus extract all income in excess of this for
Spaniards. This was achieved by expropriating their land, forcing them
to work, offering low wages for labor services, imposing high taxes,
and charging high prices for goods that were not even voluntarily
bought. Though these institutions generated a lot of wealth for the
Spanish Crown and made the conquistadors and their descendants very
rich, they also turned Latin America into the most unequal continent
in the world and sapped much of its economic potential

sharp contrast to .... Fareed Zakaria interview with Kissinger a few
weeks ago had running ticker at the bottom somewhat paraphrasing
Kissnger (because he was somewhat hard to hear?). Fareed was asking
Kissinger about Putin, referring to Kissinger having 30 or so meetings
with Putin. At one point Fareed said something about clarifying what
Kissinger had said (which was reflected in the ticker at the bottom)
and Kissinger said not at all ... and explained what he met (which was
not reflected in the ticker).

If you are unfamiliar with this fiasco, which was also the true
proximate cause of Larry Summers' ouster from Harvard, you must read
an extraordinary expose, How Harvard Lost Russia, from Institutional
Investor. I am told copies of this article were stuffed in every
Harvard faculty member's inbox the day Summers got a vote of no
confidence and resigned shortly thereafter.

Mostly, they hurt Russia and its hopes of establishing a lasting
framework for a stable Western-style capitalism, as Summers himself
acknowledged when he testified under oath in the U.S. lawsuit in
Cambridge in 2002. "The project was of enormous value," said Summers,
who by then had been installed as the president of Harvard. "Its
cessation was damaging to Russian economic reform and to the
U.S.-Russian relationship."

TV Show "Hill Street Blues"

Mark Storkamp <mstorkamp@yahoo.com> writes:
In the early '80s (back to the Hill Street Blues era) my brother lived
in Alaska. Talking to him was a PITA since a call to up there was
half-duplex over a satellite with a long delay, and what ever side was
louder got priority. He had a noisy squawking parrot.

IBM got COMSAT & AETNA into SBS as equal partners. Part of the problem
was that it was dominated by the IBM communication group (there is
folklore that while SBS had continuous large losses, IBM turned a profit
... because the money it off gear sold SBS was more than its 1/3rd of
SBS losses, there is some story that when SBS finally folded, IBM also
reimbursed COMSAT & AETNA for their losses).

The original purpose was supposedly for computer communication ... but
the technology was so dominated by IBM communication group that they
couldn't make a profitable business out of it ... so the focus change to
telephone communication and for awhile SBS was heavily into consumer
satellite telephone business.

Part of the communication group problem was that SNA had fixed, small
windowing protocol (small number of outstanding packets) ... which made
very inefficient use of satellite bandwidth. It also had fixed time-out
... which barely tolerated single hop ... but double hop (west
cost->east coast->europe & back) exceed time-out and wouldn't work at
all.

I got sucked into designing/developing communication system for SBS
... had TDMA prototype/pilot with 4.5M dishes in the back of the los
gatos lab (on the west coast) and yorktown research (on the east coast)
and 7M dish in austin. Ran dynamic rate-based pacing (instead of window)
... so it easily dynamically filled and managed whatever latency
happened to be ... at whatever speed/bandwidth.

The other problem that the communication group had was that their
mainframe controller box only supported up to 56kbits/sec. By the
mid-80s, their was increasing pressure for them to do something ...
but there was no obvious way to fix the problem. One of their tactics
was that they generated report for the corporate executive committee
showing that customers didn't really want much more than 56kbits
and wouldn't be needing T1/1.5mbits until well into the 90s.

Their controller box support "fat pipes" ... where box could be
configured to simulate single link using multiple, parallel 56kbit
links. They surveyed customer "fat pipe" use and found no customers with
more than five parallel 56kbit "fat pipes". What they didn't bother to
explain was at the time, TELCO tarif charged about the same for a T1 as
5 or 6 56kbit links ... aka when customers got to 256kbit/sec or so
... they switched to T1 and used non-IBM box.

They were also spreading mis-information about how IBM mainframe
VTAM could be used for the NSF(NET) RFP ... which called for
T1. Somebody collected much of this mis-information and forwarded
to us ... from long ago and far away, heavily snipped and redacted
to protect the guilty
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006w.html#email870109

Finally, they came out with 3737 controller ... supposedly supporting T1
... it had a bunch of 68k microprocessors and boatload of memory
simulating local CTCA (channel-to-channel) connection ... local 3737
would immediately ACK mainframe packet (as if it had already arrived at
the remote mainframe) ... basically it was using the bunch of 68Ks to
simulate the remote mainframe VTAM ... and then doing actual
transmission in the background (to compensate for all the SNA/VTAM
protocol and operational deficiencies)

Even with all the 3737 68Ks, it peaked out at about 2mbit/sec aggregate
... US T1/1.5mbit/sec fullduplex ... is 3mbit/sec aggregate ... and EU
T1/2mbit/sec fullduplex is 4mbit/sec aggregate.

The ICL 2900

Bob Eager <news0006@eager.cx> writes:
Yes, we got a VAXcluster (the base CPU power of an 8800, running SMP, was
a bit under the IBM offering, so they chucked in a couple of 8200s). In
fact, since it was on VMS 4.6, it couldn't do SMP anyway, and didn't for
years.

that had VMS/cluster support in their same source base ... to ease port,
I did API for global lock manager that emulated the VMS/cluster
semantics. The implementation also benefited from list that the RDBMS
vendors had about what VMS/cluster could have done better.

the dust-up was over whether you could do high-availability with
"commodity" systems (at the time he was working for DEC DBMS). Then when
DEC DBMS was sold to Oracle, he took a sabbatical ... and then shows up
as head of Microsoft San Francisco Research. I got my "revenge" when he
shows up on stage with CEO of Microsoft announcing microsoft
high-availability on intel platforms.

As I've mentioned before, within a few weeks of the Jan1992 Ellison
meeting, cluster scaleup was transferred, announced as IBM supercomputer
for technical/scientific *ONLY* (we had also been working with national
labs on cluster scaleup uses), and we were told we couldn't work on
anything with more than four processors. Contributing was that the
mainframe DB2 group were complaining if I was allowed to go ahead, it
would be at least 5yrs ahead of what they were doing.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal) writes:
I'm sorry - but it was quite common for IBM customers to
tweek the OS. Significantly in many cases. I don't doubt that
many also had custom block-mux channels for various purposes.

that got a lot more difficult with the OCO-wars (ibm stop providing
source). in the wake of various legal actions, ibm has the 23jun1969
"unbundling" announcement ... starting to charge for software,
maintenance, SE services, etc
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#unbundle

... however, IBM managed to make the case that kernel software should
still be free. during the FS period (was completely different than
360/370 and was completely replace 360/370), 370 efforts were being
shutdown. The lack of 370 offerings during the FS period is credited
with giving clone processor makers market foothold
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys

when FS imploded, there was a mad rush to get stuff back into the 370
pipelines ... that contributed to decision to release a bunch of 370
stuff I had been doing all during the FS period (I would also
periodically ridicule FS activities, which wasn't exactly career
enhancing).

IBM went thru transition period ... that previous kernel software was
still free, but increasingly amounts were charged for ... until switched
to all kernel software was priced. Then came the "OCO-wars" where source
was no longer shipped. Part of the IBM argument was that customer
changes inhibited moving customers to new versions of software and
hardware models (possibly even software that was increasingly difficult
to run on clone processors).

The ICL 2900

hancock4 writes:
Back then some customers had emotional prejudices which influenced
their selection of computer. As we know, many customers felt, "you
never get fired for buying IBM", and went that way, even if the
price/performance/quality might have been better with alternatives.
On the other hand, there were some customers who disliked IBM for
various reasons, and refused to consider an IBM machine.

I had co-worker at IBM Research that left and was doing a lot of
consulting work in silicon valley. For a long time, he had major chip
design customer ... working for the Senior VP for Engineering (that had
started using cp67/cms as young silicon valley engineer in the 60s). He
had done port of AT&T C compiler to vm370/cms with a lot of 370
performance optimizations and ported a lot of UCB chip design tools.

He was then doing ethernet support ... for connecting SGI graphics
terminals to backup 370 "server". The IBM salesman came by and asked him
what he was doing. The IBM salesman then told him that he should do
token-ring support instead ... or he might find that mainframe service
wouldn't be as timely as it had been in the past. I then got an hour
phone call that involved a lot of four letter words. The next morning
the senior VP of Engineering held press conference to announce that they
were moving off IBM mainframes to sun servers.

Then there was a lot of internal task-forces looking at technical
reasons that chip industry was moving off IBM mainframes ... totally
ignoring the salesman issue.

also for various reasons the original mainframe TCP/IP product appeared
to be significantly crippled (possibly to make sure that sna/vtam was
faster). I then did the changes to support RFC1044 ... and in some tests
at cray research between 4341 and cray ... demonstrated sustained
channel media throughput using only modest amount of 4341 CPU (possibly
500 times improvement in bytes moved per instruction executed)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#rfc1044

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

The ICL 2900

Rich Alderson <news@alderson.users.panix.com> writes:
Which was greeted with hoots of laughter from the (sadly moribund) 36-bit DEC
customers, who had SMP on the PDP-10 architecture nearly a decade earlier. :-(

I periodically mention that Charlie had invented compare&swap when he
was working on CP67 fine-grain kernel multiprocessing locking at the
science center (came up with compare&swap because CAS are Charlie's
initials)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech

in the initial morph from CP67 to VM370 lots of my stuff was dropped
(back to my days as undergraduate) ... but also SMP support.

we had a number of projects to put SMP support into VM370 ... thus my
upthread comment about including kernel reorg for SMP ... but not actual
SMP support itself.

however the kernel reorg stuff was included as part of my "charged-for"
resource manager (as well as bunch of my other stuff) ... during the
transition period, older kernel code and hardware support would still be
free ... but could charge for new (non-hardware) support kernel
software. The problem with shipping SMP support in VM370 Release 4 (for
free) was that the kernel reorged needed for SMP support was already
part of my charged for kernel add-on. The eventual resolution was to
moved nearly 90% of the code from my charged for kernel add-on into the
free kernel base (w/o changing the price for my kernel add-on).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#fairsharehttp://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#wsclock

also, the initial effort to get compare&swap added to 370 architecture
was rebuffed, the POK favorite son operating system people saying that
test&set (from 360) days was more than adequate. The 370 architecture
owners said that to justify compare&swap for 370 ... uses other than
just kernel SMP locking was required ... thus was born the descriptions
(still in appendix of principles of operation) for use by large
multi-thread applications (like large DBMS transaction systems). In the
80s, you start to see other plaforms implementing compare&swap (or
instructions with similar semantics) for large multi-thread commercial
applications.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#smp

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

a couple years ago, mainframe hardware revenue was something like 4%
and dropping, while total mainframe group (including software &
services) was 25% of total IBM revenue and 40% of profit ... basically
milking the (dying?) cash cow.

mid-80s, top executives were predicting that IBM revenue would double
primarily based on mainframes ... and they had massive internal
bldg. program to double mainframe gear manufacturing capacity
(business was already start to go in the other direction, but it
wasn't exactly career enhancing to point it out). They also had
massive number of "fast-track" MBAs rotating between executive and
middle management positions ... getting ready for the company to
double. A few years later the company goes into the red and was being
reorganized into the 13 "baby blues" in preparation for breaking up
the company.

We had left the company but was called by somebody in the bowels of
armonk if we could help with the breakup ... turns out that lots of
business units had MOUs to use supplier contracts in other business
units ... these all had to be identified/cataloged and turned into
contracts of their own, as part of the breakup (new CEO was brought in
to resurrect the company and reverse the breakup before we got
started).

We had been hearing that top executives weren't paying attention to
the business but busily shifting expenses from the following year into
the year that company went into the red. We later asked our contact in
Armonk about this. He explains that that the year company went into
the red, executives wouldn't get their bonus ... but if they could
shift enough expenses from the following year ... the following year
will be moved barely into the black .... and the way the executive
bonus plan was written, they would then get a bonus more than twice as
large as the largest bonus ever given (effectively getting paid for
taking the company into the red).

loc905-7:
Foster was stunned by his brother's suggestion that Sullivan &
Cromwell quit Germany. Many of his clients with interests there,
including not just banks but corporations like Standard Oil and
General Electric, wished Sullivan & Cromwell to remain active
regardless of political conditions.

loc938-40:
At least one other senior partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, Eustace
Seligman, was equally disturbed. In October 1939, six weeks after the
Nazi invasion of Poland, he took the extraordinary step of sending
Foster a formal memorandum disavowing what his old friend was saying
about Nazism

... snip ...

From the law of unintended consequences; 1943 US Strategic Bombing
Program, they needed German industrial and military targets and
coordinates, they got the information and detailed plans from
wallstreet.

Lot of intelligence agency articles seem to be obfuscation and
misdirection. Underlying is the enormous outsourcing that occurred
last decade ... 70% of budget and over half the people (including
Snowden)
http://www.investingdaily.com/17693/spies-like-us

the enormous outsourcing ... especially to private-equity owned
beltway bandits under heavy pressure to generate revenue for their
owners every way possible (outsourced security clearances were found
to be doing paperwork but not the background checks) ... seems to have
contributed to the rapidly spreading success of failure culture (and
possibly contributes to poor cyberattack countermeasures)
http://www.govexec.com/excellence/management-matters/2007/04/the-success-of-failure/24107/

trivia: we may have tangentially involved, but we didn't realize it
until the articles start appearing. 2002, we get a call and asked to
respond to a unclassified IC-ARDA BAA that was about to close (IC-ARDA
has since been renamed IARPA). The BAA said something about none of
the tools they have do the job. We get the response in and then have a
few meetings showing that we can do what is needed ... and then
nothing. Later, we hear by the grapevine that top executives told the
BAA principal that he hadn't sufficiently proven to their satisfaction
that what they have won't do the job. We then wonder why they let the
BAA to be released in the first place (conjecture that top executives
thought there would be no response and it would shut the principal
up).

disclaimer: I've never had clearance or job in the government
... although periodically people have thought I did. As undergraduate
in the 60s, gov. agencies used a lot of software that I did (although
I didn't know it at the time). Later some would show up at my
computer/security class ... and bragged offline they knew where I was
every day of my life back to birth (they asked me to name any date and
they would tell me where i was).

1999 I was asked to try and help prevent the coming economic mess by
improving integrity of securitized mortgage supporting documents;
securitized mortgages had been used during S&L crisis to obfuscate
fraudulent mortgages (posterchild were office bldgs in Dallas/Ft.Worth
that turn out to be empty lots).

Later the dealers find they can buy triple-A rating from rating
agencies for securitized mortgages (even when rating agencies knew
they weren't worth triple-A, from Oct2008 congressional testimony)
largely enabling over $27T done 2001-2008, "triple-A rating" trumps
supporting documents and they can start doing no-documentation, liar
loans and no longer need to care about borrower's qualifications or
loan quality (triple-A rating also enables selling to institutions
restricted to only dealing in "safe" investments, like large pension
funds). Then they find they can do toxic CDOs designed to fail, pay
for triple-A, sell to their victims, and then take out CDS/derivative
gambling bets that they would fail (creating enormous demand for bad
loans, now they cared about borrowers' qualification but not in the
traditional way).

The largest holder of the CDS/derivative gambling bets was AIG and
negotiating to pay off at 50cents on the dollar when the SECTREAS
steps in and says that they have to sign a document that they can't
sue those making the gambling bets and forced to take TARP funds to
pay off the CDS gambling bets at face value. The largest recipient of
TARP funds is AIG and the largest recipient of face value payoffs is
the firm formally headed by the SECTREAS.

Claim is that during the period (2001-2008) "finance" tripled in size,
as percent of GDP (huge skimming off the $27+T and the CDS/derivative
gambling bets, not improving economy but enormously increasing their
share of the economy). NY state comptroller also released statistics
that aggregate wallstreet bonuses spiked over 400% during the period.

trivia: from the law of unintended consequences; the largest fines so
far related to the economic mess are for the TBTF robo-signing
mills fabricating the documents for the no-document liar loans.

loc2276-79:
The Oregon researchers went and tested the hypothesis anyway. It
turned out to be true. If you wanted to know whether you had cancer or
not, you were better off using the algorithm that the researchers had
created than you were asking the radiologist to study the X-ray. The
simple algorithm had outperformed not merely the group of doctors; it
had outperformed even the single best doctor. You could beat the
doctor by replacing him with an equation created by people who knew
nothing about medicine and had simply asked a few questions of
doctors.

loc/2291-93:
Why would the judgment of an expert--a medical doctor, no less--be
inferior to a model crafted from that very expert's own knowledge? At
that point, Goldberg more or less threw up his hands and said, Well,
even experts are human. "The clinician is not a machine," he
wrote. "While he possesses his full share of human learning and
hypothesis-generating skills, he lacks the machine's reliability."

loc2296-99:
Right after Goldberg published those words, late in the summer of
1970, Amos Tversky showed up in Eugene, Oregon.

... snip ...

I remember reading articles in the 70s about medical profession
pushing back against these findings.

trivia: in the 90s we did some work on computer image recognition of
breast cancer xrays (in conjunction with xray moving from film to
digital), with somebody from Michigan.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

The North & Iran/Contra was 80s, Reagan administration ... when the
senior Bush was VP (and repeatedly claimed no knowledge of Iran/Contra
because he was fulltime administration person created S&L crisis).

April 1985 - The PROFs e-mail system becomes fully operational within
the NSC, including not only the full staff, but also home terminals
for the National Security Adviser, Robert "Bud" McFarlane, and his
deputy, Admiral John M. Poindexter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_OfficeVision
PROFS and its e-mail component, known colloquially as PROFS Notes,
featured prominently in the investigation of the Iran-Contra
scandal. Oliver North believed he had deleted his correspondence, but
the system archived it anyway. Congress subsequently examined the
e-mail archives.[1].

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/networkbus/
PROFS changed the way organizations communicated, collaborated and
approached work when it was introduced by IBM's Data Processing
Division in 1981. The next year, the White House adopted a prototype
email system of the PROFS system for the US National Security Council
(NSC) staff, and soon PROFS became the most popular office system for
companies needing a central shared way of communicating and working,
along with managing the increasing flow of information.

When congress subpoena the email ... only somebody with necessary
security clearances could scan the backup tapes for selecting what
congress asked for (since effectively every possible clearance was
required)

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

How Private Equity Firms are Designed to Earn Big While Risking Little of Their Own

IBM has gone into the red and is in the process of being reorganized
into the 13 "baby blues" in preparation for breakup the company. The
board then hires away the former president of AMEX to reverse the
breakup and resurrect IBM. Uses some of same techniques at IBM that
had been used at RJR
http://www.ibmemployee.com/RetirementHeist.shtml

Later the former president of AMEX leaves IBM and becomes head of
another major private-equity company which does LBO of company that
will employ Snowden. Private-equity take-over of beltway bandits last
decade significantly accelerated federal gov. outsourcing. Private
equity subsidiaries are under intense pressure to cut corners and
generate revenue any way possible (outsourced security clearances were
found to fill out the paperwork but not actually do the background
checks). 70% of the intelligence budget and over half the people
http://www.investingdaily.com/17693/spies-like-us/

Blockchain

rob.schramm@GMAIL.COM (Rob Schramm) writes:
There are just loads of uses and possibilities for blockchain. I had
started looking into coding for Bitcoin to use unused cycles on z/OS to
make money. But then migrated over to blockchain as a concept to act as a
proof or record history. I was pondering single user record concept that
would always stay with you. Single source of identification. Of course
then there are stories of people losing bitcoins never to recover them...
It might make for a bad lost password concept...but It is really exciting
stuff.

Executive Order 13,233 was signed by President Bush on November 1,
2001, so that his White House Counsel -- not the National Archives --
could review 68,000 pages of records from the Reagan Presidential
Library, and decide if the public had the right to read them. These
documents included a six-page 8 December 1986 memo to the President
and Director of Public Affairs entitled, "Talking Points on
Iran/Contra Affairs"; a series of memos dated 22 November and 1
December 1988 for the President entitled, "Pardon for Oliver North,
John Poindexter, and Joseph Fernandez"; and a two-page memo for the
President from the Attorney General, "Appeal of the Decision Denying
the Enforcement of the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1987."

... snip ...

HISTORIANS, PUBLIC INTEREST GROUPS SUE TO STOP BUSH ORDER; Say New
Restrictions on White House Files Violate Presidential Records Act;
"Bush Order Attempts to Overturn the Law, Take the Power Back"
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20011128/

The Presidential Records Act of 1978 (PRA) emerged from the scandals
of the Nixon presidency to require former presidents to release their
records no later than 12 years after they leave office. Under the PRA,
as amended, the U.S. government asserts complete "ownership,
possession, and control" of all Presidential and Vice-Presidential
records.

... snip ...

and earlier period (this reference is to Bush1 when Ford appointed him
to head CIA, replacing Colby), National Insecurity: The Cost of
American Militarism (Melvin A. Goodman) pg247/3512-16:
Colby would not allow a clearly polemical group, led by Harvard
professor Richard Pipes and referred to as Team B, to hijack the
production of intelligence estimates. Bush had no qualms about doing
so. Ford removed Colby, and Pipes -- with the help of Cheney and
Rumsfeld -- named a team of right-wing academics and former government
officials to draft their own intelligence estimates on Soviet military
power. It is noteworthy that neither Cheney nor Rumsfeld mention the
Team B chicanery in their recently published memoirs.

... snip ...

After White House Chief of Staff Rumsfeld gets Colby replaced by Bush
who will go along with "Team B" estimates (justifying significant DOD
budget increases), Rumsfeld resigns and becomes SECDEF (replaced by
his assistant Cheney).

The World Crisis, Vol. 1, Churchill explains the mess in middle east
started with move from 13.5in to 15in guns (which requires moving from
coal to oil) loc2012-14:
From the beginning there appeared a ship carrying ten 15-inch guns,
and therefore at least 600 feet long with room inside her for engines
which would drive her 21 knots and capacity to carry armour which on
the armoured belt, the turrets and the conning tower would reach
the thickness unprecedented in the British Service of 13 inches.

loc2087-89:
To build any large additional number of oil-burning ships meant basing
our naval supremacy upon oil. But oil was not found in appreciable
quantities in our islands. If we required it, we must carry it by sea
in peace or war from distant countries.

loc2151-56:
This led to enormous expense and to tremendous opposition on the Naval
Estimates. Yet it was absolutely impossible to turn back. We could
only fight our way forward, and finally we found our way to the
Anglo-Persian Oil agreement and contract, which for an initial
investment of two millions of public money (subsequently increased to
five millions) has not only secured to the Navy a very substantial
proportion of its oil supply, but has led to the acquisition by the
Government of a controlling share in oil properties and interests
which are at present valued at scores of millions sterling, and also
to very considerable economies, which are still continuing, in the
purchase price of Admiralty oil.

Paper Tape

dave.g4ugm@GMAIL.COM (Dave Wade) writes:
High Speed card readers read all columns of the card at the same time,
so they have 80 sensors, and read the card row-by-row, allowing much
faster reading. There is no reel of tape that has inertia that has to
be controlled on a stop.
A card deck is easy to edit, we used to have a hand punch for minor JCL corrections.
A damaged card can often be recovered by manual copying.

The ICL 2900

David Wade <dave.g4ugm@gmail.com> writes:
Ah I started on a 360/67 which definitely had separate channel boxes.

The Honeywell 6000/L66/DPS8 series machines also predated the 2900 and
had the same sort of configuration, with CPU's and I/O controllers
attached to the Memory. Like the ICL2900 CPU's could be taken off line
and the dual CPU system we had could be reconfigured as two single CPU
systems.

I have no idea how wide the memory access was but I do know that when
doing tape I/O the CPUs were locked out.

There was exception for 370/115 & 370/125 done by Boeblingen (or
Boblingen with the umlaut, just check internet, says in german it is
always transliterated to "e", but in Swedish it is dropped), Germany
... and folklore is that they got their hands slapped by corporate.

They did memory bus with positions for up to nine microprocessors
... all identical ... running different microcode for 370, i/o, device
controllers, etc. 125 was identical to 115 except that the
microprocessor running 370 microcode was 50% faster than the other
processors. At one point, I was sucked into designing a 370/125
multiprocessor where up to 5 of the bus positions would running the 370
multiprocessor microprocessors. some past posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#bounce

it was never announced/shipped ... in part because the 138/148 people
complained it overlapped their throughput at better
price/performance. At the time, I had also been sucked into doing
370/148 stuff ... so in some escalation meetings ... I was required to
represent both sides of the table and argue with myself. part of the
138/148 effort was the ECPS microcode ... dropping operating system
stuff directly into native microcode, getting 10:1 speedup:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#21 370 ECPS VM microcode assist

I was working on superset of ECPS for the 125 ... but also something
that was superset of what would become SSCH for 370-xa ... because I had
all the system microcode in the same box.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#27 370 ECPS VM microcode assist

with the implosion of FS, there was mad rush to get 370 stuff back into
product pipelines ... including kicking off 303x & 3081 in parallel ...
some (FS, 303x, 3081) history:
http://www.jfsowa.com/computer/memo125.htm

for 303x external channel box, they took the 158 integrated channel
microcode (w/o the 370 microcode). A 3031 was a 158 processor with just
the 370 microcode and 2nd 158 processor with just the integrated channel
microcode. A 3032 was a 168 processor with a 158 processor as external
channel. A 3033 started out as 168 logic mapped to faster chips (and one
or more 158 processors for external channels).

360/65 and 360/67 single processors were nearly identical except for
addition of virtual memory hardware for 360/67.

360/65 and 360/67 multiple processor were a lot more different. 360/65
multiprocessor shared real memory ... but not I/O, external channel
boxes were only attached to single processor. To simulate shared I/O
they used "multi-tail" controllers (that could be connected to multiple
channels) that were configured at same addresses on the respective
processor channels.

360/67 multiprocessor shared both real memory and each processor could
be configured to access/share all channels ... there was director
... and memory was multi-ported with independent path for I/O). 360/65
& 360/67 single processor had to share same memory ports with
I/O. Mutli-ported 360/67 memory had slightly longer latency for all
accesses (resolving multi-port protocol) ... but in heavy i/o loads,
could have overall higher throughput (because allowing concurrent
activity, some configurations even ran 67-2 with only single
processor). Pg. 43 starts instruction times and gives formulas. Pg. 46
starts average instruction times and shows the difference between single
processor (67-1) and 67-2 multi-ported memory (with slightly increased
latency).

shows the multiprocessor director (2167,pg29) which could reconfigure
for complete sharing ... or partition hardware in number of ways. It also
shows that the settings of the director could be read/sensed from the
"control registers" (pg31-32). multiprocess posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#smp

There was a three processor 360/67 for Air Force Manned Orital
Laboratory (MOL) project being done by Lockheed in Sunnyvale that had
special modifications that allowed the software to change/update the
2167 hardware configuration by storing/setting values in those control
registers.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

The ICL 2900

Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
it was never announced/shipped ... in part because the 138/148 people
complained it overlapped their throughput at better
price/performance. At the time, I had also been sucked into doing
370/148 stuff ... so in some escalation meetings ... I was required to
represent both sides of the table and argue with myself. part of the
138/148 effort was the ECPS microcode ... dropping operating system
stuff directly into native microcode, getting 10:1 speedup:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#21 370 ECPS VM microcode assist

I was working on superset of ECPS for the 125 ... but also something
that was superset of what would become SSCH for 370-xa ... because I had
all the system microcode in the same box.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#27 370 ECPS VM microcode assist

following the demise of the 125 multiprocessor effort, I got sucked into
working on a generalized 370 16-way multiprocessor. At first we got good
reception from around the company and even got the 3033 processor
engineers to work on it in their spare time (more interesting than
remapping 168 logic to faster chips). Then somebody leaked to the head
of POK (high-end mainframe) that it could be decades before the POK
favorite son operating system (MVS) had effective 16-way support. In
response, the head of POK invited some of us to never visit POK again
and instructed the 3033 processor engineers to stop being distracted.

about having worked on supporting channel extender in 1980 and
then asked in 1988 to help LLNL standardized some serial stuff
they have which quickly becomes fibre channel standard. some
related posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#ficon

HONE APL Systems

Science Center ported apl\360 to CP67/CMS for CMS\APL. Typical APL\360
was 16kbyte (or sometimes 32kbyte) workspace that completely swapped
the workspace. It would allocate new physical storage for each
assignment statement ... until it exhausted storage and then do
garbage collection. Move to CMS\APL just involved interpretor
(eliminated all the other APL\360 stuff), extended workspace to
virtual address size ... and added functions to access system services
(like file read/write) ... enabling a lot of real world
applications. Business planners in Armonk used CMS\APL on the Science
Center system ... loading the most holy of corporate data for business
simulation (requiring very strong security since the system was also
used by non-employees, students & teachers from various
Cambridge/Boston area institutions). science center posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech

APL\360 Storage management & garbage collection had to be redone
because even a small program could quickly touch all virtual memory
resulting in page thrashing in demand paged environment.

The APL "purists" lambasted the Science Center implementation for
accessing system services ... which they eventually "fixed" with
"shared variables".

One of my hobbies was enhanced production systems for internal
datacenters. HONE, world-wide online sales&marketing support, was one
of my long time customers (lot of the applications were done in APL, I
believe largest APL operation in the world). It was real thorn in IBM
hdqtrs side because MVT/MVS/etc was favorite son operating system and
it came as shock when an executive finds out HONE was virtual machine
based operation ... and there was repeated efforts to try and shift it
to MVS. Eventually in the 80s, corporate started saying that inability
to migrate HONE to MVS was my fault ... they would be able to migrate
to MVS if I would stop providing enhancements for HONE systems.

IBM Disk Engineering

They use to let me wander around San Jose area ... customers, disk
development, DBMS development, etc. Disk enginneering & disk
product test had lots of mainframes for stand alone disk development
(7x24 scheduled around the clock). They had once tried MVS for
concurrent development, but it turned out to have 15mins MTBF in that
environment (requiring manual re-IPL). I offerred to rewrite I/O
supervisor to make it bullet proof and never fail ... enabling any
amount of on-demand, concurrent testing (greatly increasing
productivity). I made the mistake of writting an internal report about
the effort that included reference to MVS 15mins MTBF ... which
brought done the wrath of the MVS group on my head (I was told that
they would have gotten me separated from the IBM company if they could
have figured out how).

About the same time I submitted open door about my salary including
lots of supporting material. I got back written response from head of
HR that after detailed review of my complete career, I was making
exactly what I was suppose to. I made a copy of everything and
resubmitted with cover letter that I was being asked to interview
recent graduate new hires for a new group that would work under my
direction ... and they were being offered starting salary 1/3rd more
than what I was making. I never got a written response, but I got
1/3rd raise that put me on level playing field with the new
hires. People periodically had to remind me that business ethics was
an oxymoron.

Some of In the wake of the Future System failure and the mad rush to
get stuff back into the product pipelines ... 303x & 3081 (370-xa)
efforts were kicked off in parallel. The head of POK managed to
convince corporate to kill VM370, shutdown the VM370 (burlington)
development group, and transfer all the people to POK ... or otherwise
POK wouldn't be able to ship MVS/XA on scheudle (some 7yrs
later). They weren't going to tell the development group of the
shutdown until just before it happens (to minimize the numbers that
might be able to escape). There the information was leaked and witch
hunt for person that leaked the information (fortunately for me,
nobody gave up the leaker). Lots of people got to escape and stay in
the Boston/Cambridge area (this was about the time that DEC started
VAX/VMS project and the joke was that the head of POK was major
contributor to VMS). Eventually Endicott managed to save the VM370
product mission, but had to reconstitute a development group from
scratch. There are lots of comments by customers in the VMSHARE
archive about VM370 code quality during that period; TYMSHARE started
providing their CMS-based computer conferencing system free to SHARE
starting in Aug1976 ... archives here:
http://vm.marist.edu/~vmshare/

some of the people that went to POK worked on a virtual machine
facility that was solely targeted at supporting MVS/XA development and
was never suppose to be released to customers. Much later a cobbled
together version was released as the migration aid because customers
weren't migrating from MVS to MVS/XA like they were suppose to. Then
POK/Kingston browbeat corporate (and Endicott) to fund a large group
to bring migration aid up to level for release as VM/XA. What was
released was far inferior to the VM370 that had been enhanced to
support XA (by sysprog in Rochester).

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

I had introductory fortran and then the univ hired me to redo 1401
MPIO for 360/30. I got to design & implement my own monitor,
scheduler, interrupt handlers, device drivers, error recovery, etc
(MPIO was unit record<->tape front end for 709 ibsys that was
tape->tape). Then they hired me fulltime to be responsible for
production 360/65 os/360 (actually 360/67 originally for tss/360, but
had to run as 360/65 most of the time).

In the early 70s at the science center did a lot of assembler, APL,
and PLI work. One of my early PLI programs was to analyze assembler
programs, turning into abstract representation, looking for all
possible execution paths looking for register use before set, and
generate psuedo high-level program representation.

Did an early REX (before renamed to REXX) program trying to
demonstrate that it wasn't another pretty scripting
language. Objective was to re-implement IBM's dump reader IPCS (tens
of thousands of assembler statements) working half-time in less than
3months elapsed time in REX ... with ten times more function and runs
ten times faster. I finished early so started development of library
of code that automatically looked for large number of most common
failure signatures. Eventually it was used by almost all internal
datacenters and PSRs ... but some reason never shipped to customers. I
did get approval to make user group presentations at BAYBUNCH and
SHARE on how I did the implementation. Within a few months customer
implementations started to appear. The closest "DUMPRX" came to
shipping was by the 3090 service processor group.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#dumprx

A couple people at Los Gatos lab first did IBM's mainframe pascal
implementation and started using it for all sort of applications. I
did a replacement for VM370 spool file system in pascal that ran in
virtual address space which ran ten times faster than the native
assembler implementation with a lot more function (that also never
ships to customers). The original IBM mainframe TCP/IP was done in
that Pascal ... but the first implementation had a lot of issues (even
though it never had any of the exploits and vulnerabilities that have
been epidemic in C-language TCP/IP implementations). C-language
programming mistakes
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#buffer

I then did the TCP/IP RFC1044 enhancements and in tuning tests at Cray
Research got sustained channel throughpt between 4341 and Cray only
using a modest amount of 4341 processor (about 500 times improvement
in bytes moved per instruction executed, original got 44kbytes/sec
using 3090 full processor).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#rfc1044

I was also working with CJNNET corporate backbone ... that was
restricted to 37x5 controllers that were limited to 56kbit lines
... even single full-duplex 56kbit link needed 3-4 blocks/sec. Then
the communication group corralled CJNNET telling corporate that the
internal network would stop working if it wasn't converted to SNA
... and CJNNET meetings were restricted to management only (problem
was that technical people might dispute the alternate facts). The
communication group had already managed to get the VNET product
shipped to customers restricted to SNA drivers ... but the internal
VNET still used the native VNET drivers that had significantly higher
throughput. some old email
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006x.html#email870302http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#email870306

Of the general-purpose systems having the largest fraction of total
installed value, the IBM S/360 Model 30 was ranked first with 12%
(rising to 17% in 1969). The S/360 Model 40 was ranked second with 11%
(rising to almost 15% in 1970). [Figs. 2.10.4 and 2.10.5]

Of the number of operations per second in use, the IBM S/360 Model 65
ranked first with 23%. The Univac 1108 ranked second with slightly over
14%, and the CDC 6600 ranked third with 10%. [Figs. 2.10.6 and 2.10.7]

... snip ...

Amdahl doing ACS/360 ... with supercomputer and 1/3rd supercomputer plus
1/9th supercomputer models for the rest of the market:
To achieve a profit for the ACS program, Amdahl asked IBM management to
approve three ACS/360 models: the high-performance design, a 1/3
performance version, and a 1/9 performance version. He felt that these
performance goals would be a good fit with the System 360 marketing
plans. He remembers that IBM Corporate Marketing evaluated the targets
and reported: 1) the supercomputer alone was a loss leader! 2) the
supercomputer plus the 1/3 performance computer was break-even! And 3)
the supercomputer plus both the 1/3 performance computer and the 1/9
performance computer was normal profit -- 30% pre-tax!

... snip ...

executives then cancel ACS/360 because they were afraid that it would
advance the state of the art too fast and they would loose control of
the market. At the bottom of the page, it shows ACS/360 features
showing up in ES/9000 more than 20yrs later.

big disruptive innovation could provide unexpected opportunities for
competition ... especially with huge changes in price/performance (it
could easily mess up bottom line and profit margins) ... case in point
was growth of ibm/pc market.

I've frequently referred to talk by senior disk engineer at internal
communication group world-wide annual conference ... supposedly on 3174
performance but opened with statement that the communication group was
going to be responsible for the demise of the disk division. Issue was
the communication group had stangle hold on datacenters with their
strategic responsibility for everything that crossed the datacenter wall
and were fiercely fighting off distributed computing and client/server,
trying to preserve their (emulated) dumb terminal install base. The disk
division was seeing the drop in disk sales with data fleeing to move
distributed computing friendly platforms. The disk division had come
up with several solutions, but they were constantly being vetoed by
the communication group. past posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#terminal

in the mid-80s, top ibm executives had predicted the business would
double ... mostly based on mainframe sales ... and had big internal
building program to double manufacturing capacity of mainframe related
products ... however business was already starting to go in the opposite
direction. By the early 90s with loss of significant mainframe business,
the company had gone into the red and was being reorganized into the 13
"baby blues" in preparation for breaking up the company (when a new CEO
was brought in to reverse the breakup and resurrect the company)
... some past posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#gerstner

Mid-90s, the remaining mainstay of the mainframe business was the
financial community with huge, critical business applications dating
back to early 360 days. The financial community spent billions of
dollars on reimplementing for straight-through parallel processing on
large numbers of killer micros ... to alleviate the overnight cobol
batch settlement bottleneck of these ancient applications. However, they
were using some standard library parallelization software that had
hundred times the overhead of cobol batch ... when they were warned
about the problem ... it was just ignored. They finally had to face it
when some large scale pilot rollouts went down in flames ... and they
had to retrench to doing large scale Y2K remediation on these ancient
legacy applications.

Middle of last decade, I was involved in taking some technology to
financial association groups, that easily handled straight-through
financial processing ... allowing specification of high-level rules
that then generated fine-grain SQL statements. It relied on the
significant performance work that all the major RDBMS vendors had
invested in cluster (parallel) scaleup (it didn't try to do the
parallelization effort, it just decomposed work into units that then
were efficiently parallelized by cluster scaleup). Initially it got
really good acceptance ... but then ran into brickwall. Finally we
were told that there were still too many executives that bore scars
from the failed attempts in the 90s ... and it would have to wait for
a whole new generation.

Kabuki Theater

Local DC news will periodically refer to Congress as Kabuki Theater
... what you see has very little to do with what is really going
on. The appearance of conflict between the two parties is more like
Roman Circus keeping the public distracted.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#kabuki.theater

Jan2009 I was asked to HTML'ize the Pecora Hearings (30s congressional
hearings into '29crash, resulted in criminal convictions and
Glass-Steagall act) with lots of internal HREFs and URLs between what
went on then and what went on this time (comments that the new
congress might have appetite to do something). I work on it for awhile
and then get a call that it won't be needed after all (reference to
enormous mountains of wallstreet cash totally burying capital hill).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#Pecora&/orGlass-Steagall

The ICL 2900

Jon Elson <elson@pico-systems.com> writes:
Second, IBM had no experience with mass-producing ICs. They were going to
build a machine that was basically a 3083, in 1968 or so! So, they were
pushing their ability to create the technology WAY beyond their abilities.

this has description of 3081 ... basically FS simulator that was
extremely inefficient and manufacturing costs were much higher
... especially compared to clone competition
http://www.jfsowa.com/computer/memo125.htm

The 370 emulator minus the FS microcode was eventually sold in 1980 as
as the IBM 3081. The ratio of the amount of circuitry in the 3081 to its
performance was significantly worse than other IBM systems of the time;
its price/performance ratio wasn't quite so bad because IBM had to cut
the price to be competitive. The major competition at the time was from
Amdahl Systems -- a company founded by Gene Amdahl, who left IBM shortly
before the FS project began, when his plans for the Advanced Computer
System (ACS) were killed. The Amdahl machine was indeed superior to the
3081 in price/performance and spectaculary superior in terms of
performance compared to the amount of circuitry.]

the 308x originally was only to ship multiprocessors and never ship
single processor product. the problem was that ACP/TPF (airline control
program & being used for some financial networks) didn't have
multiprocessor support ... and they were afraid the whole ACP/TPF market
would move to clone makers (that continued to offer single processor
machine). There was quick&dirty effort to come out with 3083 by removing
one of the processors from 3081 (one of the 1st issues was processor0
was at the top of the machine ... just removing processor1 in the middle
would have made the machine dangerously top-heavy)

and
https://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/acs_end.html
Adding the third even smaller computer came out with normal profit! IBM
management decided not to do it, for it would advance the computing
capability too fast for the company to control the growth of the
computer marketplace, thus reducing their profit potential. I then
recommended that the ACS lab be closed, and it was.

... snip ...

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

A decision by IBM in May 1968 to modify the project to support S/360
compatibility resulted in the name change from ACS-1 to ACS-360 for the
computer being designed.
...
The ACS-360 project was canceled in May 1969;

So, 1 year trying to include compatibility then they threw in the towel.
But those same "disruptive" changes did go to market:

however, many of the innovations resulting from the project would
eventually find direct realization in the IBM RS/6000...

Lynn has characterized the FS project as one that put a halt to
S/360 software/hardware enhancement.

Amdahl was working on 360 compatibility from the start ... but was
"disregarded" ... it wasn't until 1968 that he won the "shootout" with
the ACS-1 faction.

the description has the ACS-1 group designing a non-compatible machine,
it was Amdhal that was responsible for a 360 compatible ... and various
folklore talks about shoot-out between ACS-1 and ACS-360 ... with Amdahl
winning. Amdahl extended ACS-360 design to also include 1/3rd speed and
1/9th speed to address the whole 360 makret (rather than just high end
supercomputer). reference to "shootout"
https://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/acs_end.html

Amdahl: We ended up having a shoot-out. The two of us who did the
360-compatible version won. We established that in fact we could achieve
more performance at lower cost.

...
Bob Evans came out to ACS with about five technical people and they held
a shoot-out. We won and I was made the lab manager. The first thing I
did was have the two smaller computers costed. I then submitted the
three system plan to corporate pricing. The single highest speed
computer was a loss leader. The second smaller computer added made a
break-even program. Adding the third even smaller computer came out with
normal profit! IBM management decided not to do it, for it would advance
the computing capability too fast for the company to control the growth
of the computer marketplace, thus reducing their profit potential. I
then recommended that the ACS lab be closed, and it was.

... snip ...

and
https://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/acs.html
Amdahl's opinions about the advantages of compatibility were disregarded
in 1965, and by 1967 he was quarantined by the ACS leadership because of
his continued advocacy for compatibility. In early 1968, he began
discussing a compatible design with John Earle, who sketched out a
five-gate-level pipelined implementation. In May 1968, IBM east-coast
management approved a "shoot-out" between ACS-1 and AEC/360 (the
"Amdahl-Earle Computer" proposal).

Amdahl and Earle won the shoot-out, and a decision was made to convert
the project to S/360 compatibility. Gone were the extended floating
point formats and the unique ACS-1 instruction set design. Several
members of the hardware and software architecture team left at this
point, but the project continued under Amdahl's leadership. The
compatible design was called the ACS/360, and several of the ACS
innovations undergirded the design. For example, like the ACS-1, the
ACS/360 was planned as the first computer with multiple instruction
decoding and issue, and it would also have been the first to use a
branch target buffer (called at that time "prefetch sequence control
registers").

In May 1969, IBM east-coast management rejected Amdahl's plan for three
ACS/360 models, and the project was cancelled. However, the legacy of
the ACS project extended beyond the cancellation, although sometimes
without recognition that the ideas were developed as part of ACS or
descended from ACS work. Some of these ideas include multiple condition
code registers, dynamic instruction scheduling techniques, numerous
compiler optimization techniques, branch target buffer design, I/O to
cache techniques, MECL-III high-speed ECL circuits, scan-out and FRU
(Field Replaceable Unit) techniques.

Describes Future System was completely different and was going to
completely replace 370 ... and 370 efforts were being shutdown ... and
the lack of 370 products during the period allowed clone processors to
gain market foothold.

Talks about the major motivation for Future System was competition from
clone controllers, the objective was to so change the architecture and
make the interface between processor and I/O controllers so complex that
there would be no (easy) entry for clone controllers.

I've posted before about doing clone controller as undergraduate
at the Univ. starting with Interdata/3 ... and four of us getting
written up for (some part of) clone controller business. It
evolved into Interdata/4 (handling channel interface) and cluster
of Interdata/3s handling port/line scanner function. past
clone controller posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#360pcm

I also periodically tell the story about Amdahl having seminar in large
MIT auditorium in the early 70s talking about his new clone mainframe
company. At one point somebody in the audience asked how he convinced
the money people to back his company. He replied that even if IBM walked
completely away from 360, there was enough customer 360 software it
would keep him in business through the end of the century. This sort of
implies that he knew that Future System was in the works, but he claims
that he didn't know anything about it. He was also given bad time with
questions about becoming almost totally foreign company (with major
ownership and all manufacturing from outside the country).

is credited with helping bring the RIOS chip design in a year
early. HSDT had 7M satellite dish next to the engineering bldg in Austin
and 4.5M dish in Los Gatos running high-speed satellite links. Austin
group used the link to constantly ship design to the logic simulators
(for validation) in Los Gatos and San Jose.

In summer 1968, Ed Sussenguth investigated making the ACS/360 into a
multithreaded design by adding a second instruction counter and a second
set of registers to the simulator. Instructions were tagged with an
additional "red/blue" bit to designate the instruction stream and
register set; and, as was expected, the utilization of the functional
units increased since more independent instructions were available.

... snip ...

I've periodically mentioned that I got sucked into effort to do
multithreaded 370/195 (that was never announced or shipped).

and
Sidebar: ES/9000 high-end processors

The ACS/360 structure appears to have influenced the design of the IBM
ES/9000 high-end ("520-based") processors some twenty-odd years
later. The ES/9000 high-end processors were structured as:

I-decoding

128 KB I-cache
4 K entry BHT; presence of branch in BHT indicates predict-taken
five 64-bit instruction buffers
ability to decode up to two instructions per cycle (e.g., a branch can
be decoded in parallel with preceding instruction but not with following
instruction)
instructions tagged with two predicted-branch-path bits

ACE, with three effective address adders

I-ACE with two-entry queue; can execute LA instructions on its own
D-ACE with four-entry queue
SXE-ACE

BXE, for controlling branch prediction and resolution

can execute BC instuctions on its own

GXE, for executing fixed-point instructions

six-deep instruction queue, which can start up to two instructions per
cycle in certain cases (e.g., one instruction has a general register
result and the other has a storage result)

FXE, for executing floating-point instructions

six-deep instruction queue, which can start up to one instruction per
cycle

SXE, for executing the storage-to-storage, decimal, and system control
instructions register renaming

cp67h didn't normally run in cambridge machine because there were
students and professors from boston/cambridge area univ. also using the
machine ... and there was need extra security to isolate support for
unannounced 370 virtual memory.

cp67h/cp67i was regularly running for a year before the first
engineering 370/145 with virtual memory was operational. In fact when
engineering 370/145 was deemed operational, cp67i boot was used first
used to test ... and it immediately failed. It turned out that engineers
had reversed implementation of two of the new "B2" opcodes ... that
problem was quickly identified and cp67i was quickly patched to match
the (incorrect) implementation.

As 370/145s were becoming available internal (still not shipped to
customers), lots of places were running cp67i ... and two engineers came
out from San Jose to add 3330 & 2305 support to cp67i which became
cp67sj.

Later 370/165 was having loads of problems retrofitting virtual memory
support ... and the decision was made to cut a lot of features from base
370 virtual memory architecture ... to cut 6months from the 370/165 time
(allowing virtual memory support to be announced and shipped earlier).
That met that all the other machines & software that had already
implemented the additional features ... had to be redone.

contacted me in the mid-80s about the original multilevel source update
... which I turned out to have in archives. I pulled it off and
transmitted to her. It was lucky timing, I had triple-redundant archive
tapes ... all in the IBM Almaden tape-library. Unfortunately Almaden was
to have operational problem where random tapes were being mounted as
scratch ... and within a couple months all those tapes were over
written.

The ICL 2900

Stephen Wolstenholme <steve@easynn.com> writes:
One of the ICL machines I worked used water cooled modules. I forget
which model it was. The cooling system never went wrong. I also worked
on fixed disc system that used water and air cooling. The water
cooling never failed and was maintenance free. OTOH the air cooling
needed the fans and filters to be cleaned at least once a week.

the large 370s, 308x, 3090, etc used closed (distilled) water inner loop
heat exchange to external chilled water cooler.

there was thermal sensor on the inner loop ... however at one customer
they lost flow on the external water side ... and by the time the
(internal) thermal sensor was tripped ... but by then it was too late
... the capacity of the inner loop couldn't handle the heat in the
system and fried a bunch of circuits. after that they put flow sensors
on the external water side.

IBM Field Service had bootstrap diagnostic process ... that started with
scoping for failed components. with everything inside thermal conducting
modules, that was no longer process. That started the "serivce
processor" for 3081 ... a computer that could be scoped/diagnosed
... which then connected to lots of probes into the termal conducting
moduels ... which then used to diagnose those modules. The 3081 service
processor had ROI software where everything had to be invented from
scratch. For the 3090, they decided to use a 4331 running a modified
version of vm370 release 6 and all service software running in CMS.
Before customer ship, they moved to a pair of redundant 4361s (in place
of 4331). One of the 3090 requirements for the 3092 (4361 service
processors) was a pair of 3370 FBA disks ... even for MVS installations
(MVS never had FBA disk support)

The ICL 2900

hancock4 writes:
But the world of business was cruel. The Director retired, and
the manager expected to be appointed in his place. Instead
the manager was fired. Go figure.

There are two career paths in front of you, and you have to choose
which path you will follow. One path leads to promotions, titles, and
positions of distinction.... The other path leads to doing things that
are truly significant for the Air Force, but the rewards will quite
often be a kick in the stomach because you may have to cross swords
with the party line on occasion. You can't go down both paths, you
have to choose. Do you want to be a man of distinction or do you want
to do things that really influence the shape of the Air Force? To
be or to do, that is the question. Colonel John R. Boyd, USAF
1927-1997

From the dedication of Boyd Hall, United States Air Force Weapons
School, Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada. 17 September 1999

The ICL 2900

Jon Elson <elson@pico-systems.com> writes:
I think that slowing down and making a much more modest jump in the
technology was a very wise decision. Going to the 360/85 (ICs and indirect
water cooling) and the model 195 was a big enough jump. Someone on here a
month or two ago mentioned they used 360/85s internally to IBM, and theat
they were not reliable. I believe most (maybe all) of the /85s were used at
NSA, and don't think they would have tolerated poor reliability. So, maybe
those units used internally were first production models and never got some
important upgrades. The 360/85 was the prototype for the 370/165, and was
pretty close to the actual 370/165 hardware. I think a major difference was
the /85 was built with 16-bit SRAM chips, and by the time the /165 was made,
they had progressed to 64-bit SRAMs. The SRAM was used in the storage
buffer (cache) as well as the writable control store. The /85 had fixed
control store derived from 360/50 and /65 capacitive ROS technology plus 500
words of writable control store. I think the /165 was all writeable.
Anyway, the 370/165 and /168 were VERY successful models, and my experience
with a /168 was it was one of the most reliable IBM mainframe systems in at
that time. (Of course, the DAT environment on the /168 allowed them to
close a whole bunch of holes in the OS that had been responsible for lots of
unreliability, too.)

I mentioned earlier in the thread regarding acs_end multithreading and
getting sucked into helping with multithreading 370/195 (which was never
announced or shipped). One of the things the 195 engineers said was that
the 195 had so many circuits ... that even with a very high circuit MTBF
... 360/195 still had some number of faults. A big change going to
370/195 (and improving reliability) was adding instruction retry for
transient faults.

I've mentioned before being asked over in mainframe mailing list about
decision to migrate all 370s to virtual memory (modulo 370/195 which was
much bigger problem than even 370/165 mentioned recently). Response was
that MVT had really horrible storage allocation and typical regions were
four times larger than needed to offset the storage allocation
problem. A typical 370/165 with 1mbyte memory only ran four regions ..
however migrating to virtual memory ... it could increase number regions
by a factor of four and still do little or no paging.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011d.html#73 Multiple Virtual Memory
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011d.html#74 Multiple Virtual Memory
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011d.html#81 Multiple Virtual Memory

Initial move of MVT to virtual memory was SVS ... was essentially MVT
operating in single 16mbyte virtual address space ... a little bit of
software to create/manage that virtual address space. The biggest effort
involved MVT I/O paradigm where applications either directly or indirectly (via
library sofware) built their own CCWs (i/o channel programs) and
executing EXCP/SVC0 kernel call to executie the I/O.

The CCWs work with "real" addresses, but SVS applications were building
CCWs with virtual addresses. EXCP processing then needed to make a copy
of the passed channel programs ... substituting real addresses for the
virtual addresses. This was the largest amount of code needed ... and
they borrowed the equivalent routines from CP67 (CCWTRANS) for the bases
of their implementation.

I later got into big dustup with the MVS RAS (reliability, availability,
serviceability) group when I rewrote I/O supervisor for disk engineering
labs. ... posts getting to play disk enginneer
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#disk

They had bunch of 370 machines scheduled around the clock (7x24) for
testing. They had tried MVS hoping to enable multiple concurrent testing
... but MVS had 15min MTBF (in that environment) requiring manual
reboot. I offered to rewrite I/O supervisor making it bullet proof and
never fail ... enabling on-demand, concurrent testing, greatly improving
productivity. I wrote an internal paper on all the details and happened
to mention the MVS 15min MTBF ... which brings the wrath of the MVS
group down on my head (i was told that they tried to have me separated
from the IBM company, but were unable ... but they held a grudge and
used their influence in other ways).

big change going from 168-1 to 168-3 was doubling cache size from
16kbytes to 32kbytes. To do that they used the 2k bit in the address
... which only worked with 4k virtual pages (didn't work in 2k virtual
pages) ... so it was very much a MVS machine. There was a large customer
running VS1 (that used 2k virtual pages) under vm370 and upgraded from
168-1 to 168-3 and saw significant throughput decrease. The additional
problem was that vm370 normally had control register in 4k mode ... but
would switch to 2k mode when running virtual operating system that used
2k. The 168-3 problem was that everytime page size mode was change, the
complete cache had to be flushed.

who were remapping 168-3 logic to 20% faster chips (and previously were
168 engineers) ... they mentioned one of the other things moving from
165 to 168 was optimization of the 370 microcode implementation that
reduced avg 370 instruction machine cycles from 2.1 machine cycles to
1.6 machine cycles/370-instruction

disclaimer: 1999 I was asked to try and help prevent the coming
economic mess by improving the integrity of securitized mortgages
supporting documents. securitized mortgages had been used during the
S&L crisis to obfuscate fraudulent mortgages (posterchild was
office bldgs in Dallus/FtWorth that turn out to be empty lots). They
then find that they can pay rating agencies for triple-A ratings (when
rating agencies know that they aren't worth triple-A, from Oct2008
congressional testimony). Triple-A rating trumps supporting
documentation and they can start doing no-documentation liar loans. It
was major factor in being able to do over $27T 2001-2008 (especially
selling to institutions restricted to dealing only in "safe"
investments, like large pension funds). From the law of unintended
consequences, the largest TBTF economic mess fines so far are
for the robo-signing mills fabricating the missing documents (also top
item regarding current SECTREAS nomination).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#toxic.cdo

There was facade that $700B TARP funds were appropriated to buy the
TBTF offbook toxic assets but just the four largest TBTF
were still carrying $5.2T ye2008. Also Jan2009 there was news about it
was too hard to evaluate value of these offbook toxic assets for
purchase ... but is was "too hard" because they were no-documentation,
liar loans (also several tens of billions in offbook toxic assets had
gone for 22cents on the dollar late summer 2008; if the offbook toxic
assets had been bought at that price, the TBTF would had been
declared insolvent and forced to be liquidated). In any case, TARP was
used for other purposes and the FED bought trillions in offbook toxic
assets at 98cents on the dollar and providing tens of trillions
in ZIRP funds. FED fought long hard legal battle to prevent
disclosure of what they were doing. When they lost, the FED Chairman
held press conference to say that he thought the TBTF would use
the ZIRP funds to help mainstreet, when they didn't, he had no
way to force them (but that didn't stop the ZIRP funds).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#too-big-to-failand
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#fed.chairmanand
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#zirp

another family member then presides over the economic mess 70 times
larger than the S&L crisis. S&L crisis had 1000 criminal convictions
with jailtime, proportionally the economic mess should have 70,000.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#s&l.crisis

Jan2009 (decade after being asked to try & help prevent the economic
mess), I'm asked to HTML'ize the Pecora Hearings (30s congressional
hearings into '29crash, resulted in Glass-Steagall and criminal
convictions) with lots of internal HREFs and URLs between what
happened then and what happened this time (comments that the new
congress might have appetite to do something). I work on it awhile and
then get call saying it won't be needed after all (comments that
capital hill was buried under enormous mountains of wallstreet cash).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#Pecora&/orGlass-Steagall

Paying for triple-A (and immediately selling everything off), allowed
lenders no longer to care about borrower's qualification and/or loan
quality. Then they found they could design securitized mortgages to
fail, pay for triple-A, sell to their victims and take-out CDS
gambling debts that they would fail (now they cared about loan
quality, but not exactly as you would expect). The largest holder of
CDS gambling bets was AIG. AIG was negotiating to payoff at 50cents on
the dollar when the SECTREAS steps in and has them sign a document
that they can't sue those making the gambling bets and to take TARP
funds to pay off at face value. The largest recipient of TARP funds
was AIG and the largest recipient of face value payoffs was firm
formerly headed by SECTREAS.

Friedman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman
Friedman promoted an alternative macroeconomic viewpoint known as
"monetarism", and argued that a steady, small expansion of the money
supply was the preferred policy.[12] His ideas concerning monetary
policy, taxation, privatization and deregulation influenced government
policies, especially during the 1980s.

loc1200-1206:
There are plenty of examples from other countries to copy: the US
individual retirement account system is based on the Chilean pension
reform of 1980/81 that in turn was based heavily on proposals made in
the book Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman. In response to the
Chilean system facing a likely collapse in a few decades time, it was
substantially overhauled in 2008 to require mandatory participation of
all citizens in exchange for universal pension coverage.

"The Undoing Project" goes into some detail how Kahneman and Tversky
disproved Economists' assumption that people make rational decisions
... loc:1155-59:
He had listened to an American economist talk about how so-and-so was
stupid and so-and-so was a fool, then said, "All your economic models
are premised on people being smart and rational, and yet all the
people you know are idiots." Kahneman (a psychologics) gets Nobel
Prize in economics, in part for debunking Friedman economic theories
that assumed rational people.

... snip ...

Another part of "undoing" has to do with when faced with missing
information ... people frequently attempt to force fit something
familiar and certain for the unknown. loc2769-71:
After he had heard Amos explain how the mind arranged historical facts
in ways that made past events feel a lot less uncertain, and a lot
more predictable, than they actually were, Biederman felt certain that
his and Danny's work could infect any discipline in which experts were
required to judge the odds of an uncertain situation—which is to say,
great swaths of human activity.

I've partially characterized as taking shortcuts to improve
performance for financial transactions by going to regular tables with
uniform information. One of the long-term problems is that
unknowns/nulls are constantly advised against ... in part because SQL
queries will frequently result in the inverse of what a human would
expect. trivia: at the some time as original SQL/relational
implementation, I also got con'ed into helping implement a graph
(rather than table) relational DBMS ... which handles 3-value logic
and is significantly better at handling unknown and non-uniform
information.

When I was writing the financial industry privacy standard (originally
x9.99, which was going to ISO standard, so needed to take into account
other countries) .... financial industry somewhat ambivalent ... they
wanted a standard they could point to and saying they were meeting
... but they didn't want it too strong.

Something similar happened when we were brought in to word-smith some
cal. state legislation ... some of the things they were working on was
electronic signature act, data breach notification act (first in
country), and opt-in personal information sharing (privacy).

at the time, they had done detailed privacy-related public surveys and
the #1 issue was fraudulent financial transactions as result of breaches
... and there was little or nothing being done about it. Issue was that
normally entities take security measures in self protection ... however
in the case of breaches, the institutions weren't at risk, it was the
public. It was hoped that publicity from notifications might prompt
corrective action. Since then there have been half dozen or so federal
data breach notifications bills introduced (none yet passed) that would
effectively eliminate most requirements for notification.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#data.breach.notification

In the case of the opt-in personal information sharing act ... which
would require a record on file indicating that you had approved
divulging/sharing your personal information. Before it was able to
pass ... a (federal preemption) "opt-out" provision was added to GLBA
(now better known for repeal of glass-steagal) ... which allows
sharing/divulging your information unless there is record on file of
you objecting. Note at 2004 national privacy conference in DC, there
was panel discussion with all the FTC commissioners. Somebody in the
audience asked if they were going to do anything about "opt-out"
... he said that he worked for call-center technology company and all
the major financial institution 1-800 "opt-out" operators weren't
provided any mechanism for recording public objections (so there would
never be a record objecting). The FTC commissioners just ignored him.

In any case, getting back to x9.99 draft ... as part of the effort
there was meetings with the HEW/HHS people responsible for HIPAA. They
said that it dates back to the 70s ... and it was constant battle with
congress trying to get it passed ... and at the time, there was still
no provisions for enforcing the security requirements. I also included
in the x9.99 introduction the part from the cal. data breach
notification act ... it was the public that was at risk, not the
institutions ... and therefor they frequently had little motivation to
do anything.

But they were fighting on too many fronts. Carl Levin of Michigan and
Jeff Merkley of Oregon had discovered that Dodd had discreetly gutted
the Volcker Rule, and the two set to work trying to counteract Dodd's
efforts. The Merkley-Levin Amendment articulated Volcker's idea fully
-- and wrote it as law. No regulatory backsliding, once everything
settled down.

... and "Age of Greed" pg370:
In addition, the Justice Department was now investigating reduced rate
mortgages Mozilo allegedly sold to Senators Chris Dodd of Connecticut
and Kent Conrad of North Dakota, as well as two former heads of Fannie
Mae, Jim Johnson and Franklin Raines. They were known as "Friends of
Angelo."

another family member then presides over the economic mess 70 times
larger than the S&L crisis. S&L crisis had 1000 criminal convictions
with jailtime, proportionally the economic mess should have 70,000.

Jan2009 (decade after being asked to try and help prevent the economic
mess), I'm asked to HTML'ize the Pecora Hearings (30s congressional
hearings into '29crash, resulted in Glass-Steagall and criminal
convictions) with lots of internal HREFs and URLs between what
happened then and what happened this time (comments that the new
congress might have appetite to do something). I work on it awhile and
then get call saying it won't be needed after all (comments that
capital hill was buried under enormous mountains of wallstreet cash).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#Pecora&/orGlass-Steagall

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

disclaimer: 1999 I was asked to try and help prevent the coming
economic mess by improving the integrity of securitized mortgages
supporting documents. securitized mortgages had been used during the
S&L crisis to obfuscate fraudulent mortgages (posterchild was office
bldgs in Dallus/FtWorth that turn out to be empty lots). They then
find that they can pay rating agencies for triple-A ratings (when
rating agencies know that they aren't worth triple-A, from Oct2008
congressional testimony).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#s&l.crisis(triple-A) toxic CDO posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#toxic.cdo

Triple-A rating trumps supporting documentation and they can start
doing no-documentation liar loans. It was major factor in being able
to do over $27T 2001-2008 (especially selling to institutions
restricted to dealing only in "safe" investments, like large pension
funds). From the law of unintended consequences, the largest TBTF
economic mess fines so far are for the robo-signing mills fabricating
the missing documents (also comes up in the confirmation of curent
SECTREAS nomination).

There was facade that $700B TARP funds were appropriated to buy the
TBTF offbook toxic assets, but just the four largest TBTF were still
carrying $5.2T ye2008. If the offbook toxic assets had been brought
back on the books, the TBTFs would had been declared insolvent and
forced to be liquidated (late summer 2008, some $60B in offbook toxic
assets had gone for 22cents on the dollar).

In any case, TARP was used for other purposes and the FED bought
trillions in offbook toxic assets at 98cents on the dollar and
providing tens of trillions in ZIRP funds. FED fought long hard legal
battle to prevent disclosure of what they were doing. When they lost,
the FED Chairman held press conference to say that he thought the TBTF
would use the ZIRP funds to help mainstreet, when they didn't, he had
no way to force them (but that didn't stop the ZIRP funds).

Paying for triple-A (and immediately selling everything off), allowed
lenders no longer to care about borrower's qualification and/or loan
quality. Then they found they could design securitized mortgages to
fail, pay for triple-A, sell to their victims and take-out CDS
gambling debts that they would fail (now they cared about loan
quality, but not exactly as you would expect). The largest holder of
CDS gambling bets was AIG. AIG was negotiating to payoff at 50cents on
the dollar when the SECTREAS steps in and has them sign a document
that they can't sue those making the gambling bets and to take TARP
funds to pay off at face value. The largest recipient of TARP funds
was AIG and the largest recipient of face value payoffs was firm
formerly headed by SECTREAS.

hancock4 writes:
That is a reason that self regulation is usually inadequate and an
outside force is necessary.

In the 1930s, Wall Street strenuously insisted that no regulation
was needed, but New Deal policies not only protected the public, but
protected Wall Street from itself. Things like the SEC, prohibition
of insider trading, separate of investment banking, much higher
margin requirements, honest financial statements, did a lot to
promote business health.

One shudders to think where we'd be if we didn't have the FDA testing
drugs for effectiveness and safety before they were marketed. Indeed,
even with that, the drug makers still push drugs for all sorts of
things, and push hard.

note congress exempted themselves from the insider trading regulations
... and several members of congress were found to have done significant
trades after being briefed by Greenspan on the imminent financial crash
... just one of long list of things that motivate references that
congress is the most corrupt institution on earth.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#fed.chairman

I've periodically mention that Jan2009 I was asked to HTML'ize the
Pecora hearing (30s congressional hearings into crash of '29,
resulted in glass-steagall and jail terms, references that the
new congress might have appetite to do something). I work on it
for awhile and then get a call that it won't be needed after all
(reference to enormous mountains of wallstreet cash totally
burying capital hill) ... past posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#Pecora&/orGlass-Steagall

Less well known is that SOX also contained provision that SEC does
something about the rating agencies ... but they did as much about the
rating agencies as they did about public company fraudulent financial
filings. Oct2008 congressional hearings into the pivotal role that the
rating agencies played in the financial mess ... found that they were
selling triple-A ratings on securitized mortgages even when they knew
they knew they weren't worth triple-A. Past triple-A rated toxic CDO
posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#toxic.cdo

During the Oct2008 hearings one of the TV reporters commented that there
would never be federal prosecution of the rating agencies because they
could blackmail the federal gov. with credit rating downgrade.

loc2276-79:
He had listened to an American economist talk about how so-and-so was
stupid and so-and-so was a fool, then said, "All your economic models
are premised on people being smart and rational, and yet all the people
you know are idiots."

Savage and the economist Milton Friedman wrote in 1948, the proper
analogy was to an expert billiards player who didn't know the
mathematical formulas governing how one ball would carom off another but
"made his shots as if he knew the formulas."

Somewhat amazingly, that's where economists left things for more than 30
years. It wasn't that they thought everybody made perfect probability
calculations; they simply believed that in free markets, rational
behavior would usually prevail.

... snip ...

Friedman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman
Friedman promoted an alternative macroeconomic viewpoint known as
"monetarism", and argued that a steady, small expansion of the money
supply was the preferred policy.[12] His ideas concerning monetary
policy, taxation, privatization and deregulation influenced government
policies, especially during the 1980s.

loc1200-1206:
There are plenty of examples from other countries to copy: the US
individual retirement account system is based on the Chilean pension
reform of 1980/81 that in turn was based heavily on proposals made in
the book Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman. In response to the
Chilean system facing a likely collapse in a few decades time, it was
substantially overhauled in 2008 to require mandatory participation of
all citizens in exchange for universal pension coverage.

another family member then presides over the economic mess 70 times
larger than the S&L crisis. S&L crisis had 1000 criminal
convictions with jailtime, proportionally the economic mess should
have 70,000.

360 & Series/1

One of the baby bells did a vtam&37x5ncp on series one with
significant more function and significantly more performance and much
better price/performance. I got sucked into doing project to move it
to rs/6000 (RIOS) base with enormous increased performance and price
performance. I did lengthy presentation on the effort in Raleigh. What
the communication group did next (to block the effort) can only be
described as truth is stranger than fiction.

To mainframe vtam they simulated everything as cross-domain, with all
resources owned by the distributed environment

IBM bought ROLM which used all Data General boxes. ROLM then ordered
more than years production of Series/1. To get the series/1 as part of
effort ... I had to do some horse trading with the ROLM data
processing manager ... I would do some work for them, if they would
let me have some Series/1

The Peachtree processor used in the series/1 was significantly more
capability than the processors used in the 37x5 controllers. There was
effort in the early 70s to get the communication group to use
Peachtree ... but they wouldn't do it

There was an internal "greencard" done in IOS3270 (trivia 3090 service
processor was 4361 running vm370/cms with all the screens done in
IOS3270). I've done q&d conversion to html
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/gcard.html

The VMSG author also did parasite/story in the late 70s. The PROFS
group had picked up a very early version of VMSG to use as their email
client. Later when the VMSG author offered a much improved version,
they tried to get him fired (because they had taken credit for the
email client). Everything quieted down when the VMSG author
demonstrated that his initials were in a non-displayed field in every
PROFS email. Afterwards he only shared source with me and one other
person.

Parasite/story used VM370 logical device support (and pass-through
virtual machine, PVM), implemented HLLAPI-like functionality (well
before HLLAPI) and was small enough that ran in CMS transient
area. old post with parasite/story description and sample stories
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001k.html#35"story" that automagically logs into RETAIN and retrieves all "PUT"
buckets
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001k.html#36

More trivia: IMS hot-standby really wanted the Series/1 vtam/ncp
simulation. One of the problems they had was fall over could happen in
a couple minutes ... but it could require a couple hours to
reestablish all the VTAM sessions (large customers could have tens of
thousands of sessions) ... vtam session initiation was heavy weight
operation and overhead increased non-linearly with number of
sessions. One of the functions the Series/1 support was "shadow"
sessions ... any time a session was initiated with vtam ... a shadow
session could be done with the IMS hot-standby vtam (which eliminated
the vtam fall-over session initiation elapsed time).

Must have been when my wife was in kindergarten ... she was in the
gburg JES group and head of POK con'ed her into going to POK to be in
charge of mainframe loosely-coupled architecture. She did
peer-coupled shared data architecture, but didn't last very long
... in part because of constant battles with the communication group
trying to force her into using SNA/vtam for loosely-coupled operation
... and in part because of very little uptake (except for IMS
hot-standby ... until sysplex and parallel sysplex).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#shareddata

the communication group tried to discredit my 37x5 numbers
... however, I've mentioned before that one of my hobbies was enhanced
production operating systems for internal datacenters and HONE was
long-time customer ... and I used the communication group's HONE 37x5
"configurator" for all data. Old post with part of baby bell
presentation at (IBM user group) COMMON
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#70

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

another family member then presides over the economic mess 70 times
larger than the S&L crisis. S&L crisis had 1000 criminal convictions
with jailtime, proportionally the economic mess should have 70,000.

loc655-67:
By the time Pratt had finished, it was possible for a single individual
to take control of an S&L, then organize and lend to multiple
subsidiaries -- for land acquisition, construction, building management,
and the like -- and create his own small real estate empire entirely
with depositors' money.

Trump to sign cyber security order

JimP. <solosam90@gmail.com> writes:
Someone actually told me it would create jobs... and I replied that if
the water is undrinkable and we cannot breathe the air, no one will be
alive to worry about jobs.

The Center investigation found that the longtime leader of the unit,
Dr. Paul Wheeler, had read X-rays in more than 1,500 cases just since
2000 but never once found a case of severe black lung, despite the fact
that other doctors looking at the same films found evidence of the
disease hundreds of times. Wheeler's credentials and longtime
affiliation with Johns Hopkins often trumped those of all other doctors
involved, and administrative judges credited his reports over those of
other doctors and denied more than 800 claims.

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds; loc2276-79:
The Oregon researchers went and tested the hypothesis anyway. It
turned out to be true. If you wanted to know whether you had cancer or
not, you were better off using the algorithm that the researchers had
created than you were asking the radiologist to study the X-ray. The
simple algorithm had outperformed not merely the group of doctors; it
had outperformed even the single best doctor. You could beat the
doctor by replacing him with an equation created by people who knew
nothing about medicine and had simply asked a few questions of
doctors.

Another part of "undoing" has to do with when faced with missing
information ... people frequently attempt to force fit something
familiar and certain for the unknown. loc2769-71:
After he had heard Amos explain how the mind arranged historical facts
in ways that made past events feel a lot less uncertain, and a lot
more predictable, than they actually were, Biederman felt certain that
his and Danny's work could infect any discipline in which experts were
required to judge the odds of an uncertain situation—which is to say,
great swaths of human activity.

I've partially characterized as taking shortcuts to improve
performance for financial transactions by going to regular tables with
uniform information. One of the long-term problems is that
unknowns/nulls are constantly advised against ... in part because SQL
queries will frequently result in the inverse of what a human would
expect. trivia: at the some time as original SQL/relational
implementation, I also got con'ed into helping implement a graph
(rather than table) relational DBMS ... which handles 3-value logic
and is significantly better at handling unknown and non-uniform
information.

The funny thing is that the graph relational forces have had ongoing
battles mainstream relational dating back to late 70s ... but recently
IBM came out with announcement about a graph relational product
... making the same claims about its benefits that we've been claiming
for almost 40yrs.

Trump to sign cyber security order

jmfbahciv <See.above@aol.com> writes:
Hopefully, the EPA has been curtailed. They've been very busy
trying to put small and medium farms out of business for the last
8 years via an insane interpretation of the Clean Air and Waterways
Act.

however, they're already into attacks on "protecting air and water" by
eliminating bans on dumping coal mining debris in water supply.

With regard to climate ... even DOD/Pentagon has placed climate change
up near the top of their list of risks along with various other ecology
related problems (lack of clean water, etc) ... even ahead of problem
with China passing US as #1 economy and increasing number of computer
chips that DOD uses are made in China (and possibility that those chips
will have back doors).

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Note that there is long history of "regulatory capture" dating back to
at least 80s (but periodically predating that), not only for the
financial industry polluting the economy, but lots of drug industry
capture of FDA, oil, mining, corporate farming capture of EPA ... when
the laws and regulations can't be eliminated, "regulatory capture" means
that that regulations aren't enforced for their friends.

In the 80s, there was big influence of Friedman & wallstreet eliminating
financial regulations ... but both Bush1 & Bush2 era had regulatory
agencies also ignoring regulations ("regulatory capture") for their
friends

another family member then presides over the economic mess 70 times
larger than the S&L crisis. S&L crisis had 1000 criminal convictions
with jailtime, proportionally the economic mess should have 70,000.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#s&l.crisis